Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

I think the imposition of this burden on engineers is the result of our belief that our legislators are too incompetent or unwilling to act in the fact of clear moral hazards.<p>Tech has a very strong history of conscientious objectors. They&#x27;re not the problem. Other institutions need to do their part.

I&#x27;ve long thought that tech needs like.. a guild or trade union, or a professional association of some kind. The problem though, is that it&#x27;s so easy to get into, so there&#x27;s no easy way to &quot;police&quot; ourselves, because tech has been democratized so well-- Anyone can do a code boot-camp and be up and running within weeks. Not that that&#x27;s a bad thing, it just makes it harder to hold developers to a code of ethics or anything like that...<p>Maybe we just, as a society, need to adopt morality and ethics more deeply into our cultural DNA.

&quot;We are a small - as-of-yet unincorporated - nonprofit providing pro bono consulting on algorithmic and policy issues arising from the proliferation of: Statistical inference &#x2F; Automated decision making - often called &#x27;AI&#x27;, ...&quot;<p>From the author&#x27;s website, listed at the bottom.<p>Imagine if journalists and other people posting to the www called &quot;AI&quot; what it actually is, instead of constantly portraying it as something futuristic to capture people&#x27;s imaginations.<p>Even terms like &quot;statistical inference&quot; and &quot;automated decision-making&quot; could probably be explained using more common language to be comprehensible to the general public.

Compensation, including perks, is usually very good in tech in comparison to many other industries. Most people rationalize and convince themselves that they&#x27;re not really doing bad things, and that it&#x27;s someone else who&#x27;s the problem.<p>In some companies, the culture is also that of being oblivious (or acting oblivious) to the harm caused by the work. Facebook is the best example of this. Has there been any conscientious objector in that company? People like the WhatsApp and Instagram founders, who grew a conscience after getting billions in their pockets, don&#x27;t count (even if one or two left some money on the table when quitting).<p>Money tells many a true tale of what goes in in people&#x27;s minds.<p>The article, sadly, does not mention Facebook and all the surveillance that it enables and grows, along with oppressing people by forcing them to use &quot;real names&quot;.

While I agree that individuals should consider the ethics of the projects that they work on, I think it&#x27;s unfair to place the entire burden on them. Those in management who make the product requirements in order to sell the software are in the best position to evaluate the ethics of how software will be used. Why haven&#x27;t I read a story about management conscientiously objecting to something?

I think this is s bit naive. Americans and EU citizens could conceivably follow some protocol such that what they produce will not go against certain principles (if we even presume no such thing as dual use tech), but that would do little to stifle and control developers outside this sphere. Vladimir, Jinping, Jeong-Un, Narendra, etc., aren’t about to handicap themselves and have some realization, oh, you know what guys, we should be respecting human rights, we gotta stop.

A conscientious objector is an &quot;individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service&quot; [0]<p>I believe that it is dangerous to conflate job choice with conscientious objection.<p>Everyone should be held accountable for what they spend their day contributing to - this shouldn&#x27;t be a special case.<p>Comparing this to a situation in which someone doesn&#x27;t want to participate in compulsory murder, and in some cases risks being killed themselves, is not helpful.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Conscientious_objector#cite_note-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Conscientious_objector#cite_no...</a>

Tech has had many conscientious objectors, I&#x27;ve watched them come and go over the decades.<p>Most of them drive trucks now. A few lucky ones became artists or writers, but mostly a lot of bad outcomes.<p>One of these failed truck drivers even makes deliveries to the house of the person who forced him out sometimes, a fact which he loves laughing about.

This article is premised on the idea that basically everything the Chinese government does is unethical, which is debatable. For one, the Chinese government is largely supported by its population. There might actually be engineers working on Dragonfly who do not believe the project is unethical. It&#x27;s not that black and white...

Encouraging dissent is a small piece of what is needed. Developers must certainly consider the moral and ethical consequences of their work, but most situations are not going to be black and white, and no matter how diabolical a project might be, there is always a way to rationalize it. What is most needed is widespread public debate among those who understand the technologies in order to form consensus on appropriate directions of development. Any consensus then needs to be effectively communicated to the public and to policy makers. This helps everyone, including developers, make better decisions about what they should or should not support. Forums such as HN and various blogs can foster debate, but there seems to be a need for a more consolidated approach that someone needs to establish. As far as communicating consensus goes, I think that nonprofit organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation can be a good conduit, but they need more widespread support from the technical community.

I wrote an article on why this kind of thinking is naive a while back. I still think it is naive.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctsp.berkeley.edu&#x2F;ethical-pledges-for-individuals-and-collectives&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctsp.berkeley.edu&#x2F;ethical-pledges-for-individuals-an...</a>

It&#x27;s worth remembering that most of the directly attributable harm we associate with tech was created by small entities like the NSO Group and Cambridge Analytica. Instead of conscientious objectors applying pressure to large companies, it might be better for tech employees who come across small companies doing shady activities to report them. Many times, these smaller firms are more susceptible to pressure anyways, so this is a double benefit.

As someone who has worked in sf tech for 5-6 years I feel like I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve become too critical of the industry to continue working in it.

I know plenty of conscientious objectors in tech, they just &#x2F;don&#x27;t work in tech any more&#x2F;.

I&#x27;ve always ended up with, and still reach the conclusion that there are only two tenable options which will work against a corrupt and unethical system.<p>1. Infiltrate, subvert, and implode the system from within (that&#x27;s meant to be as Tzu-esque as it sounds).<p>2. Using parallel propaganda to get the public to realize that they have the ability to disable the system if they can collectively wield a moral, objective, and ethical compass (with all the McLuhan-esque difficulties that come with it).<p>I prefer the former. As dangerous as it is, I think it&#x27;s strategically easier to wield covert action as a tool for effecting change than it is to attempt a unification of the masses. But, maybe a combination of both these approaches would be ideal.

For my part, I&#x27;m just not interested in working at facebook or google or certain other companies because I disagree with their practices. Luckily, I&#x27;m far enough along in my career that I don&#x27;t need to take just any job, even if it is limiting to be a privacy conscious data scientist.<p>I do worry that people like me just staying out of these places leads to an echo chamber, and change from within is great. I wonder whether my individual impact on social good is greater trying to be moral at a moral company, or trying to be moral at an immoral company.<p>Luckily I don&#x27;t have to twist my logic around to justify staying and vesting.

I respect the choices of tech sector workers who choose to protest against certain company policies and even refuse to perform certain types of work that enhance mass personalised surveillance and the enhancement of military lethality.<p>It’s a different world from 30 and 70 years ago.<p>70 years ago nearly all R&amp;D spent was specifically military in nature. So it was pretty clear from the point of hire that you were(or weren’t working on military or related(surveillance) projects.<p>30 years ago military and commercial R&amp;D hit parity and it was still quite easy to known going into an employment contract what side of the fence one was on.<p>Today, almost all R&amp;D is commercial in nature, but with vast duel use military&#x2F;surveillance potential.<p>So it’s much more convoluted and nebulous to delineate project output, perhaps a major contributing factor to recent decisions and actions.<p>Combined with the long standing low supply, high demand for talent enhancing leverage.<p>I agree that tech talent conscience is critical.<p>I only hope we see the same from Chinese software engineers working at Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, etc.<p>I wonder if the future will see a convoluted analog to the Manhattan Project, the Rosenbergs, and apex talent migration out of 1930’s fascist countries.

I remember drafting up a blog post a decade ago where I theorized&#x2F;ranted that tech workers would end up being the bad guys in history. I didn&#x27;t post it because it seemed so unrealistic at the time (and because I don&#x27;t really know what I&#x27;ll do when tech is killed... maybe some kind of appliance repair?).<p>It&#x27;s quite amazing the difference 10 years makes!

What I object to is mass media and political activists trying to shame or force me to agree with their idea of &quot;ethics&quot; and political positions. I&#x27;ll decide that for myself thank you very much. When you see activists making noise you can bet there are plenty of people who disagree with them. Unfortunately when you have outlets like the New York Times and mobs of Twitter journalists adding fuel to the fire (for one side of the debate only), speaking out for what you believe becomes incredibly dangerous if you don&#x27;t go with the mainstream message.<p>So yeah, I object to everything this article says and stands for. Sadly I can&#x27;t do that under my real name because I need to keep my job.

Discussions about ethical, privacy, surveillance issues often get hand waved and diluted here. See yesterday&#x27;s thread on Google&#x27;s retaliation as an example.<p>We need a diversity of communities that can represent the the software industry in more dimensions than the VC funded side of things, growth hacking and the singular focus on success that are often in heavy conflict with any kind of value dimension and ultimately greed and opportunism crowds out every other concern.<p>There is also often a extremely selfish mercenary view of the world this is disturbing and can jade most of us and needs some maturity to handle without letting it poison ones worldview.

Tech needs fewer conscientious objectors, not more. These people rarely know anything about what they&#x27;re protesting, and resort fearmongering and populism to get what they want without even attempting to resolve things civilly.<p>The most recent example is Google&#x27;s AI ethics council debacle. Activist employees were so stubborn that they can&#x27;t won&#x27;t even let people have a discussion about AI ethics because one of them held views they disagree with. Half the authors of the American Constitution thought that slavery should be legal, but they managed draft the foundation of modern day democracy anyways.

The educational Youtube channel SmarterEveryDay made a video about his day job as a military rocket engineer. It&#x27;s an insightful how-and-why explanation for those wondering why there aren&#x27;t more conscientious objectors: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE</a>

There are plenty of people who don&#x27;t work at these companies for these reasons. There could be more of those people. But there will still be enough who are willing to do it for the right price or who actually support the morality and ethics of doing it, that it will still get built even if the vast majority of the tech industry conscientiously objected.

I worked at Google and frequently found myself acting in this capacity. I think I did well at it and was explicitly promoted for doing so. At the time I admired the way the company walked the walk in that regard.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Norbert_Wiener" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Norbert_Wiener</a>

Disheartening to see so many apathetic or downright hostile responses on here. I applaud this article for taking a stand.

I&#x27;m very uncomfortable with how we are importing Chinese censorship into our lives, due in part to tech companies needing to build services that can operate in both regions.<p>At an object level, it&#x27;s an important point to make and re-iterate.<p>On a meta-level, I am annoyed at how much special pleading I see from the NYtimes about the evils of tech, while it&#x27;s simply par for the course for -- say -- Finance to act with near impunity when managing, fund raising, and dealing with autocratic and communist regimes.

When Google&#x27;s internal turmoil surfaced about the work on Project Jedi, it did not ultimately kill the project[0].<p>As long as there&#x27;s someone else still willing to compromise their moral grounds for the value returned, it&#x27;s still going to get made. That&#x27;s just how capitalist societies work: People need to make money and someone is going to fulfill that objectional need because they have a need to fill their own coffers.<p>One need only look at the fervor against Facebook and realise that they still employ over 35k people to understand that, at the end of the day, people are either <i>willing</i> to do the task or they&#x27;re in a position that they have no other choice (considering that the US doesn&#x27;t have much of a social safety net).<p>So, while &quot;conscientious objectors&quot; might be good for a single business direction, it - sadly - does nothing for the overall scheme of things.<p>...but even <i>if</i> all of the engineers organised in North America to create manifestos, under psuedo or actual unions, which dictated what the future of tech should be used for, this does nothing to dissuade the partners (e.g.: 5Is) from doing the same and then sharing that technology <i>back</i> to their own government.<p>I concede that maybe I&#x27;m misunderstanding the author&#x27;s intent but to me, the posit seems too idyllic to be fruitful (overall) in modern society.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-04-23&#x2F;pentagon-s-designer-of-10-billion-jedi-cloud-is-stepping-down" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-04-23&#x2F;pentagon-...</a>

It really does, if you look at different engineering companies like Rolls Royce whilst the military takeover in Chile, a group of engineers in Scotland stopped working because they knew where their product was being sold too. HN seems to think that Programmers can and should get away with everything. Disturbing to say the least.

I am honestly surprised that Dragon Fly is the last straw for people at Google. The company is the embodiment of surveillance capitalism. Why is there no talk about changing that model? It just seems the activists there are piling on the &quot;China Scary&quot; bandwagon (see: Huawei and ZTE losing hella business due to US pressure) rather than changing the revenue source in order to improve privacy and reduce data collection.

Coding is a craft. I wouldn&#x27;t work on something I had moral issues with. There are grey areas for sure, but for me, work for the defense industry or a local gun shop.. nope.. go find someone else.<p>There will always be someone that doesn&#x27;t have any moral compass about their work or income. That person is simply not me.

Perhaps one day, we&#x27;ll see lists like this [0] for companies that helped the Chinese government detain entire ethnic populations, or for those that provided assistance to the Turkish regime during its purges and disappearances of opponents, or those that facilitated states, such as Russia, to politically interfere in the democratic functioning of their rivals, and the extra-judicial killing of their opponents.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_companies_involved_in_...</a>

Tech has plenty, but tech also has censorship.

The NY Times and other media companies need more conscientious objectors too.