[beatpanda]

Who's working on technology like this, and why? And why isn't it self-evidently bad to the people working on it?

I think a code of professional ethics around software engineering is long past due. Journalists started doing this in the 20s[1] after a series of events, including the Spanish-American war, made the awful potential of ethical lapses in journalism obvious to everyone.[2]

We can't continue to maintain the reflexive belief that technology is neutral and is only dangerous depending on how it's used. At some point people have to be willing to refuse to work on certain things because of the obvious social implications those things would have.

I don't know how anybody could be working on things like lethal drones, facial recognition, locked bootloaders, deep packet inspection, or other freedom-reducing technology without considering the consequences of their work.

And I recognize that not everybody thinks the technologies I mentioned above are categorically wrong, but it'd be cool to start a conversation to draw lines about what is.

1. http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp 2. Spare me, I know the profession isn't perfect and ethical lapses still abound, but at least we have some way of knowing when an ethical standard has been broken.

[meej]

"I think a code of professional ethics around software engineering is long past due."

I can think of several existing codes of ethics that might apply to software engineering.

For starters, the ACM Code of Ethics was adopted over 20 years ago. http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics

The IEEE Code of Ethics dates to 1963, which is when AIEE merged with IRE. http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html

IEEE's Computer Society also has its own code of ethics, adopted jointly with the ACM in 1999. http://www.computer.org/portal/web/certification/resources/c...

Finally, there's the Obligations of the Order of the Engineer, which has been around since 1970. http://www.order-of-the-engineer.org/?page_id=6

NCSU's Ethics in Computing website has links to most of these, and more. http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/basics/codes/

My own experience in the software industry is that professional society membership and conference attendance is relatively rare, especially when I compare it to other fields I have exposure to, like the library world, where membership in at least one professional society is de rigueur. I wonder if the problem is not a lack of a code of professional ethics but rather a lack of exposure to them?

[eloisius]

What's wrong with facial recognition? It has numerous positive uses. Automatically annotating family photo albums being one, trivial example.

Even "lethal" drones--it's not like there's one software developer who makes LethalDrone OS. There are many components to it that have very positive possibilities, for example auto stabilizing flight controls, which can and will end up being used in search and rescue drones.

[beatpanda]

I'm also a litte perplexed about why anybody needs tagging in photos. If you take photos of your family, you already know who they are. Same thing with pictures of your friends. It seems like the only reason anybody uses tagging on Facebook is to alert their friends that they're in a photo.

To me, that use case for facial recognition always felt like a front. It's an edge case, used as a justification for technology where the base case is surveillance agencies using it to identify whoever they might be after in public.

[beatpanda]

And you're telling me at no point did any software engineer write the code that allows the pilot to fire a gun, or do calculations to account for the impact of "kickback" from firing a projectile on a drone's flight path, or...

[eloisius]

Sure, they probably did and I'm not trying to argue that it's impossible to use technology for evil. In fact, I'm someone who has protested and left a project because of the ethical implications it posed.

My position, and the only point I'm trying to make is that these technologies aren't themselves sinister. It's their uses that we need to cast light on.

Saying that no one really "needs" facial recognition or photo tagging is obvious. For that matter, no one needs an iPhone, or a computer, or the internet, or books. But, it does open up new possibilities to have those technologies to work for us. Before now, there's no practical way you could query your family photo album for all photos of aunt Beulah from 1994-1998. Is it needed? No. But neither is having any recollection of your relatives.

I'd be interested in seeing what kind of criteria you can come up with for dichotomizing good and bad technology purely on technical grounds. That is, without taking into account usage and motivations for usage. I mean that sincerely and not jest.

I do agree with you that there should be some sort of "guild ethics" we adhere to, but not that we should ostracize certain technologies. We should refuse to work on certain projects or for certain organizations when we know they will be used for wrong. Firewall technology? Good. Great Firewall of China? Bad.

[phaylon]

For something less trivial, one of my thoughts for Google Glass was that it could help people who can't recognize faces themselves.

[eloisius]

That's a really good example. A neuro-prosthetic to treat prosopagnosia.

A friend of mine who is colorblind wants to see Google Glass help distinguish colors, which is more trivial, but similar.