Slashdot Mirror
How Responsible Are App Developers For Decisions Their Users Make?
itwbennett writes: In a blog post, Rado Kotorov, Chief Innovation Officer at Information Builders asserts that the creators of enterprise apps implicitly assume some of the responsibility for other people's decision making. He says it's not just developers, but anyone who is involved, from defining the concept, to requirements gathering, to final implementation. Thus, the creators of the app have an ethical obligation to ensure that people can reach the right conclusions from the facts and the way they are presented in the app.
Good luck with that. They keep building better idiots.
"In a blog post, Rado Kotorov, Chief Innovation Officer at Information Builders asserts that the creators of enterprise apps implicitly assume some of the responsibility for other people's decision making. He says it's not just developers, but anyone who is involved, from defining the concept, to requirements gathering, to final implementation. Thus, the creators of the app have an ethical obligation to ensure that people can reach the right conclusions from the facts and the way they are presented in the app."
I call bullshit. This is simply another step down a slippery slope that removes more personal responsibility.
This is the very definition of the nanny State.
RTFA.
If you look at the article, you'll see just how blatantly Slashdot has mislead us with their summary of the article. The article isn't about "apps" or even just "enterprise apps." It's specifically and only about business intelligence (BI) applications, which are intended to lead their users to make decisions and conclusions. What he's saying, fundamentally, is that "as the makers of business intelligence applications, we have a responsibility to actually not make apps that suck, since the conclusions our users will come to have major ramifications." I agree with him, in that context.
Take it and apply it to a specific situation like cancer research, and the difference between meeting his ethical standard and failing it is the difference between saving lives or losing them. And this is actually a real example; recent cancer research has largely focused upon big-data mining and BI around specific characteristics of various forms of cancer, and matching up with an incredible degree of precision which combinations of treatments work best on certain kinds of cancer. They go so far as to actually examine the genome of tumors...it's fucking cool. This is the kind of use that a BI system can fulfill, if it works. But if it doesn't work, everyone can go down a bunch of rabbit holes and it takes years to figure out that they've been chasing the wrong approaches all along.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.