[devwastaken]

Tech is much like the fission bomb. Perhaps necessary, but the industry doesn't stop there. It must create bigger. Returns, investment, power, being a have and not a have not.

"Dr. Oppenheimer, when did your strong moral convictions develop with respect to the hydrogen bomb?"

"When it became clear to me that we would use whatever weapon we had."

[jackyalcine]

Yeah. I only hesitate when we see people more eager to use things to exacerbate the harms of the world using technology. It sucks because we, as an industry, seem to only focus on the history of business gains and not on the sociological impact of said gains (the introduction of the smartphone and how that played into how people connect - or even what _was_ the first smartphone).

[ryandrake]

I think of worthwhile software projects as stools with three legs: The business opportunity, the interesting technical problem, and the social/ethical issues. They all need to be good in order to have an acceptable product, IMO.

Unfortunately, whenever you read an article about a new technology or read an interview of a founder or something, they spend all their time talking about the first two, and either ignore or give passing lip service to the third one. Even look at HN discussions. Few engineers here really care about the ethics of what they are working on. It's just "is it cool technology?" and (sometimes) "does it make money?" You ask someone if they are working on something good for the world and they look at you like you have an antler growing out of your head. "Yes, I'm making the Torment Nexus, but it uses blockchain and LLMs and it's written in Rust. It's written in RUST!"

[bluefirebrand]

I think a lot of it stems from a misguided sort of "yes I'm inventing the torment nexus, but it will never be used on me, because I'm the inventor"

Or perhaps "If it isn't me inventing the torment nexus, then someone else will"

Either way, I wish people cared more about how their inventions would be used

[rjbwork]

Nature of the system. The incentives are in place that you can either wallow in the torment nexus with everyone else, or try to invent it and get rich and escape to some little imagined slice of paradise. The world, and especially the USA, is no longer about trying to make things better and solve real actual problems - it's about trying to accumulate enough capital such you can personally opt out of the problems entirely.

[jappgar]

very few people can afford to be ethical.

it's like Joe Rogan trashing factory farms and bragging about only eating wild elk be killed with his bare hands on his private game preserve.

writing software for an oil company doesn't make you evil it makes you like everyone else. not particularly helpful nor particularly harmful

[alistairSH]

But surely there’s a line somewhere? Maybe not a clear line, but at least a fuzzy one.

Just about anything ever created can be used to oppress and do evil. But you don’t have to be the final step that enables that evil.

Rockets - you can build rockets to take us to the moon. And somebody will repurpose it for destruction. But you don’t have to be that somebody.

[bamboozled]

Social media is incredibly destructive, yet look at all the money we've made from it. Probably one in 5 people believed in "connecting the world"...

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

The early days of Facebook still seem great. I could connect with friends and family and that was it. Now it's all business and politics. Perhaps this was inevitable and it should never have been developed in the first place I don't know. Is it moral to build something for the $$$ because if you don't someone else will? Probably not.

[bamboozled]

Instagram is going the same way honestly, it took a bit longer, but I'm at the stage where I just have to unfollow nut jobs. People who used to use it in quite a lighthearted fun way too.