If you build the Torment Nexus, it might even be ever so slightly less tormentful[1] than it otherwise could have been because you're a good person, perhaps even slightly better than most.
This thing you eventually come to believe, of course, is exactly what one must believe for the Torment Nexus to be made.
Sure, there are structural and economic incentives that tilt the playing field, but this is the belief that is easier to accept than to turn down the high pay, deal with the hassles of insurance or lack of, or have to encounter the immigration authority.
I have a friend who's working at the torment nexus factory, and whilst he knows he's helping kids getting blown to literal pieces, material conditions "dictate" him that he has little other choices besides closing his eyes and hardening his heart. Or quitting and working for someone else, but that's a tough argument to make.
>But surely the real problem is a systemic one and you can’t blame the workers for participating. After all, they are just trying to feed themselves and get healthcare. And, that is correct, of course. What’s also correct is that systems are powered by people. They rely on the labor of people to function
That statement is pivotal and one which people really need to be called out on when they use it as a crutch.
"Don't hate the player, hate the game"... Motherfucker there's only a game because of the players!
It's pretty wild that software is the only "engineering" discipline without any concept of professional ethics or loyalty to human safety that superceeds the whims of the employer.
Why do people think that is? Have there been any attempts to change this from the inside over the past decade? Where are professional associations like the ACM in all of this? It's a shameful state of affairs and reflects poorly on the whole discipline.
People who design bridges and vehicles have real responsibilities and standards they are held to, yet somehow the software that actually runs these things is exempt.
This is how Boeing negligently murdered hundreds of people with MCAS. By taking responsibility for safety away from actual engineers and misplacing it with people who write software.
However, ACM continues to accept money from companies that routinely and systematically violate this code (for example privacy in section 1.6) and seems to have little interest in sanctioning them.
> People who design bridges and vehicles have real responsibilities and standards they are held to, yet somehow the software that actually runs these things is exempt.
The most impressive accomplishment of the computing industry is avoidance of any kind of liability.
Hey, first of all sorry to post this so many days late, I just got here looking to see if this article had been posted already.
I think the piece you are missing is that guilds exist to protect workers, not consumers. US software engineers not feeling as though they need the protection of guilds means by extension there are no non-government bodies to enforce codes of conduct. It is also worth mentioning that, although limited to specific high-risk use cases, software engineering is regulated.
Is it just me or is the dam starting to break on all kinds of truth-telling that were long taboo in this sort of space? I don’t think this post would have been so well-received on HN even a couple of years ago.
Reminds me of the feelings combat drone remote pilots speak of where they’re also often forced into difficult ethical positions. It’s literally the job but there is clearly also harm being done. A terrorist than turns out to be not a terrorist etc
> Tech was a sector that made us think of humankind moving forward, possibly into some happy Star Trek like future where no one needed money and pie magically appeared in your wall if you said “Magic wall, pie me!”
Am I too naive in thinking that the AIs we're working on are a prerequisite step on the way towards Star Trek's post-scarcity future?
> Your soul will not remain intact while you hoover up artists’ work to train theft-engines that poison the water of communities in need.
This sentence nose-dove the article's credibility.
Intellectual property and the enforcement thereof is in and of itself a Torment Nexus. The belief that thoughts and ideas and words and images and sounds can be "stolen", and that such "theft" is somehow a bad thing (instead of the sort of free exchange of ideas that has benefited humanity for its entire recorded history) is itself mutually exclusive with having an intact soul.
Yes, artists deserve to be able to earn a living making art (absent a universal basic income that renders the notion of "earning a living" moot). Yes, it's understandable that they choose to do so by wielding IP law, because that's the most straightforward option they have in a capitalist system that actively rewards Torment-Nexus-enforced rentseeking. No, that doesn't make them any less complicit in the perpetuation of that Torment Nexus. These are the same laws that enable Disney to sue the pants off of parents who dare to decorate their dead children's coffins after said children's favorite fictional characters. These are the same laws that rob other creatives of their creative autonomy lest their works "infringe" on the "rights" of richer creatives who can afford better lawyers. These are the same laws that normalized shipping rootkits with creative works for the sake of "digital 'rights' management". These are the same laws that actively hinder the preservation of creative works for historical posterity, causing those works to be at risk of being lost forever. Intellectual property has done vastly more harm than good, and AI throwing a wrench in the ability to meaningfully enforce it is one of the exceedingly few good outcomes of AI proliferation.
Your soul will not remain intact while you parrot MPAA/RIAA "yOu WoUlDn'T dOwNlOaD a CaR" talking points in defense of collecting royalties until 70 years after you die.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 34.3 ms ] threadThis thing you eventually come to believe, of course, is exactly what one must believe for the Torment Nexus to be made.
Sure, there are structural and economic incentives that tilt the playing field, but this is the belief that is easier to accept than to turn down the high pay, deal with the hassles of insurance or lack of, or have to encounter the immigration authority.
1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tormentful
That statement is pivotal and one which people really need to be called out on when they use it as a crutch.
"Don't hate the player, hate the game"... Motherfucker there's only a game because of the players!
Why do people think that is? Have there been any attempts to change this from the inside over the past decade? Where are professional associations like the ACM in all of this? It's a shameful state of affairs and reflects poorly on the whole discipline.
People who design bridges and vehicles have real responsibilities and standards they are held to, yet somehow the software that actually runs these things is exempt.
This is how Boeing negligently murdered hundreds of people with MCAS. By taking responsibility for safety away from actual engineers and misplacing it with people who write software.
https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
However, ACM continues to accept money from companies that routinely and systematically violate this code (for example privacy in section 1.6) and seems to have little interest in sanctioning them.
The most impressive accomplishment of the computing industry is avoidance of any kind of liability.
I think the piece you are missing is that guilds exist to protect workers, not consumers. US software engineers not feeling as though they need the protection of guilds means by extension there are no non-government bodies to enforce codes of conduct. It is also worth mentioning that, although limited to specific high-risk use cases, software engineering is regulated.
Am I too naive in thinking that the AIs we're working on are a prerequisite step on the way towards Star Trek's post-scarcity future?
This sentence nose-dove the article's credibility.
Intellectual property and the enforcement thereof is in and of itself a Torment Nexus. The belief that thoughts and ideas and words and images and sounds can be "stolen", and that such "theft" is somehow a bad thing (instead of the sort of free exchange of ideas that has benefited humanity for its entire recorded history) is itself mutually exclusive with having an intact soul.
Yes, artists deserve to be able to earn a living making art (absent a universal basic income that renders the notion of "earning a living" moot). Yes, it's understandable that they choose to do so by wielding IP law, because that's the most straightforward option they have in a capitalist system that actively rewards Torment-Nexus-enforced rentseeking. No, that doesn't make them any less complicit in the perpetuation of that Torment Nexus. These are the same laws that enable Disney to sue the pants off of parents who dare to decorate their dead children's coffins after said children's favorite fictional characters. These are the same laws that rob other creatives of their creative autonomy lest their works "infringe" on the "rights" of richer creatives who can afford better lawyers. These are the same laws that normalized shipping rootkits with creative works for the sake of "digital 'rights' management". These are the same laws that actively hinder the preservation of creative works for historical posterity, causing those works to be at risk of being lost forever. Intellectual property has done vastly more harm than good, and AI throwing a wrench in the ability to meaningfully enforce it is one of the exceedingly few good outcomes of AI proliferation.
Your soul will not remain intact while you parrot MPAA/RIAA "yOu WoUlDn'T dOwNlOaD a CaR" talking points in defense of collecting royalties until 70 years after you die.
You can take almost any tech job, and there is a probably an argument to be made, that it is mostly reasonable given some other moral priors.