[mplanchard]

It does feel a bit karmic, doesn’t it? I’ve never worked in a part of tech that was explicitly doing this, but I still feel as though all the current anxiety and uncertainty I myself am currently going through is in some way “earned” by my participation in this industry.

[tptacek]

A lot of things in the technology field's internal debate about AI feel extremely karmic to me.

[arvid-lind]

Really? Not sure if you like to work on your own cars, but would you also feel like you're accumulating negative karma for associating with the automotive and fossil fuel industries? We're not responsible for the world that is here right now, but we have to figure out how to operate within it. The idea that "we earned this" like we're all at fault for the state of things seems pretty far off.

Not trying to say you're wrong but long way of saying don't be so hard on yourself, its not like you're Elon, Altman, any of the other awful figures steering our tech world right now.

[thunky]

I don't think your analogy fits. Tech is directly responsible for automation, which impacts jobs. Tech workers didn't cry moral outrage then. But mow that tech may automate their job, suddenly it's evil.

[arvid-lind]

My point was that the world we have is here, for better or worse, and "reaping what we sowed" seems like a wildly reductive and self-defeating interpretation. There's no way this guy who says he never worked directly on automation-related tech should feel like he's banking bad karma by earning a living doing the best he can. I'm assuming that not working in automation was a conscious decision, like I've also been very selective about my employers based on their general operating philosophies.

The analogy wasn't the best, but the whole of tech isn't on the hook for this. Just like a typical daily driver or someone who works on their own car can't be directly responsible for the climate crisis. There are major players making the decisions that are causing the state we're in.

[mplanchard]

I think you’re objectively right, and I try to maintain that perspective. But, I think of this karma not necessarily in a negative way, just kind of like the chickens coming home to roost for us all.

I’m (and presumably many of us are) feeling the destabilizing effects of my industry now in a similar way to how many other professions have felt its effects before. Given our industry’s impact on society, it’s important that we feel this effect directly, so that we can do a better job of empathizing with the industries we’re “disrupting.” Whether or not I have personally participated in those aspects of the industry, I share inescapably in its overall karma, which is why it’s important to not just opt out of the parts of it I feel are immoral, but try to push for it to be better where I can.

[tptacek]

Virtually everybody in the industry is a participant in the impacts our industry has on the broader economy!

This isn't a nit. It changes the way you have to look at this. You can't say "we need to better feel the impacts IT has on the broader workforce, therefore I should avoid working on things that automate jobs away". So long as you take anything resembling a market salary anywhere, you're supplying labor to the system that does that.

Your options therefore are:

* Adopt an ethical stance that doesn't intrinsically penalize work that increases global productivity and thus exerts downward pressure on labor.

* Do work that somehow works against that pressure, for instance by donating 20-40% of your compensation to labor causes, or something like that.

* Leave the industry.

I don't look at this quandry and see an ethical imperative; I look at it and see a broken ethical calculation. From that observation, I get to: "I should shut up about things that impact employment for software developers, because there's nothing intrinsically bad about that."

(Whether or not developers, or dockworkers, come out on net positive or negative is a separable question.)