10 points jreynar 37 minutes ago 3 comments

glimshe 11 minutes ago | parent

I had two whole semesters of ethics in my CS college. It's very naive to believe this makes any difference in the way engineers act in the workplace (vs let's say an effective judiciary and appropriate liability laws).

gustavus 1 minute ago | parent

So it seems like this guy doesn't realize that for a lot of real world effecting systems like Health and Aviation that he calls out there is already a ton of regulation and rules around it.

In fact the biggest issue with safety he has seems to be the use of tech in military drones, which 1) wouldn't really be prevented by a "code" and 2) isn't an issue of engineering, it's a whole separate philosophical debate and question of values. I mean remember the guy who invited the process for mass producing nitrogen which led to fertilizer production vastly increasing and is largely responsible for ending world starvation, for which he won the novel prize, was only doing it because he wanted to figure out how to speed the production of TNT for wartime uses, he also later went on to become the father of chemical weapons in WW1.

So if your hope is "if we give every software engineer an ethics 101 course then everyone will hold hands and sing cumbaya" is hopelessly naive. In the meantime for a lot of the industries where your software can kill people there is already heavy rules around it.