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Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For? (nytimes.com)
Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. An anonymous reader shares a report: At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere. That's a change from the past, when Silicon Valley workers typically developed products with little questioning about the social costs. It is also a sign of how some tech companies, which grew by serving consumers and businesses, are expanding more into government work. And the shift coincides with concerns in Silicon Valley about the Trump administration's policies and the larger role of technology in government.
"You can think you're building technology for one purpose, and then you find out it's really twisted," said Laura Nolan, 38, a senior software engineer who resigned from Google in June over the company's involvement in Project Maven, an effort to build artificial intelligence for the Department of Defense that could be used to target drone strikes. All of this has led to growing tensions between tech employees and managers. In recent months, workers at Google, Microsoft and Amazon have signed petitions and protested to executives over how some of the technology they helped create is being used. At smaller companies, engineers have begun asking more questions about ethics.
"You can think you're building technology for one purpose, and then you find out it's really twisted," said Laura Nolan, 38, a senior software engineer who resigned from Google in June over the company's involvement in Project Maven, an effort to build artificial intelligence for the Department of Defense that could be used to target drone strikes. All of this has led to growing tensions between tech employees and managers. In recent months, workers at Google, Microsoft and Amazon have signed petitions and protested to executives over how some of the technology they helped create is being used. At smaller companies, engineers have begun asking more questions about ethics.
things change....
Why now?
Why not before.
They have been doing evil shit for a long while now.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Get back to work. If you want to do the bitch and whine and moan about of liberal SJW than get a new job. We've got thousands of eager people willing to do you job without the culture all marxism.
Let me fix that for you. "A small portion of the workforce of tech companies are concerned that the choices their employers are making goes counter to their personal political stance, and demand that their personal stance should dictate the company stance." There fixed.
At some point if you disagree with the way your employer does business, either:
1) get involved in business leadership to change the path
2) go work somewhere that matches your personal believes more closely
3) leave your politics at home and do the best job you can for what you were hired to make
A bit late to the party, aren't we? I mean -- overall "Better late than never" still rings true, but it's hard to ignore the fact that tech titans have been doing things that are unethical in different ways for quite a while.
Amazon has been gobbling up larger chunks of the economy for a decade, and will likely face a breakup at some point.
Facebook ran unethical (no explicit consent) experiments in 2012 seeing who they could persuade to vote and who they couldn't.
Google had a "collect first, ask later" data policy, and their initial maps datasets were picked up by wardriving around the US storing everyone's open WiFi network data and taking photographs long before that was an accepted data-gathering norm.
Twitter kickbans whomever they like, which is fine, but makes a showing of it being an open discussion forum for international politics and routinely "just happens" to silence folks that don't match the political whims of the Bay.
Everyone else has been making Skinner boxes for a decade and a half, trying to find any way to keep folks more and more addicted to their specific forms of entertainment, in a way far more insidious than the tobacco industry ever did.
Apple... is doing basically okay.
I'm glad people are waking up to the power of the tech. It shouldn't have had to take Chinese dissident crackdowns to do it. And GPLv3+No-Military-Use-Because-I-Don't-Like-Your-View-On-SSM isn't the answer.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
This is about as genuine as when the ECO vigilantes would all pile into their Hummer to go protest some oil related activity and leave the place trashed.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
"...what could this possibly be used for in the wrong hands?"
Home of the brave? LOL.
We just need a way of doing that isn't as outdated at what the legal and medical professions have. We don't want a protection racket or something the enshrines the outdated education model requiring degrees but we do need something to fall back on.
Are the first to die a slow and painful death due to the fact that a true enemy of the state exploits the hole/vulnerability that this tech would have closed to kill citizens in mass.
Be it biological, cyber, or armed conflict. I hope they are the first to go
We know these kind of things happen every day as executives hunt the Almighty Dollar. This is just a high-profile example of it happening, obviously. However, it is good to hear students are determined to practice ethical business. The advanced students will have their pick of the litter when it comes to jobs, and they will be highly desired wherever they go, and with enough transparency they'll be allowed to choose the nature of their projects. It's the average and less-than-average programmers that will accept the jobs with slighter shades of gray applied to them as they work a bit harder to find stability in the workplace. We can only assume that these kind of projects will have higher costs associated to them, and the final product will not reach its full potential. It's the circle of life
My challenge listening to this hand wringing blathering, is that they somehow didn't understand that their businesses - the foundation of their stock options and salaries - are entirely based on hovering personal data, and selling it.
Based upon those hugely successful business models, they can feel free to quit and protest as they've got $ in the bank.
They are working for companies who get to decide if or how much they listen to their employees. Granted, those orgs are hypocrites if they say "privacy, privacy, privacy" in the west, yet build spying tools for non western countries. I personally could care what those companies do, as long as they were transparent.
You're building it for that fat six-figure paycheck. There's your answer. Next!
Every marketing algorithm to track people's buying habits, what they look at, their social media presence, their emails, etc ... consumer surveillance can be used for political surveillance.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
-- George Orwell, 1984 (1948)
It's OK to use facial recognition as a convenient way to unlock your phone, but not to track you when you walk down the street.
It's OK to use facial recognition as a way to find friends by the pictures they post, but not to track your known associates in defying the government.
The tech is the same, just who uses it. If you want to object to selling it to China, why didn't you object to doing it for InstaFaceTwits?
When i was truck driving, i didnt get to pick & choose who i delivered loads for. The company said "go here & move that trailer to Saskatoon" and off you went.
When i was a short order cook, i didnt get to pick & choose who i made pancakes or fried chicken for... i didnt get to bitch when they went & put ketchup on the steaks. The job was cook things, so i cooked things.
I have had jobs in the past where i disagreed with the people i worked for and disliked them on a personal level... i left those jobs for those very reasons & went & found another more palatable job elsewhere.
And the shift coincides with concerns in Silicon Valley about the Trump administration's policies and the larger role of technology in government.
While one would hope that they would be concerned no matter who's in office, it doesn't appear to be the case. It's just like the "Presidential Alert" that went out last week. Even though it was something started under the Obama administration, people were suing simply because it was Trump doing it. Would they be sharing their concerns if Hillary Clinton was president right now? People need to realize that it doesn't matter if it's your person or not who is in power, because eventually it's going to be someone who's not your person. Can you trust they aren't going to misuse your technology?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
You work for someone else. They pay you to do a job. Shut up and do it. If you don't like what you do, quit and do something else... news flash - that next company is doing something equally awful or worse...
The Goal of a company is to make profit. period.
Don't like it - go to work for a non-profit at a 1/3 the salary. Either way, shut up and work.
My friend was working on what he thought was a video game audio/video sharing app, I'm not a gamer but I know there are several apps now that side by side video of you playing and what's going on in the game. Turns out it was really cam-girl software.
Most of what people do is useless. Myself I work in electronics hardware, I create next year's landfill.
Mostly random stuff.
This will never get modded high enough. They understand that by working for a company, that company gets to decide how their labor is applied right?
Corporations in general have a very easy answer to people who grow morals once they start receiving that wonderful paycheck. It usually involves removing that paycheck. People can go into the whole "we need more people that stand up for good!", but in reality if you want to pull something like this you stand a good chance of not being hired in that particular field again. If you've got the financial means to not have to worry about a paycheck, then more power to you.
The same software can be used for many different applications. Do you stop working on Kafka because some spy agencies use it in their big data stack?
I can get that "fat six-figure paycheck" at a few thousand companies. So now I can be picky and work on things I believe in, as can most developers.
Just another day in Paradise
Even though it was something started under the Obama administration, people were suing simply because it was Trump doing it.
Yep. He's got diarrhea of the mouth. He goes apeshit on twitter and I can see him wanting to even more apeshit with the Alert because then he get's to everyone.
Would they be sharing their concerns if Hillary Clinton was president right now?
Nope. I don't see her abusing it. She chilled in the last 20 years.
People need to realize that it doesn't matter if it's your person or not who is in power, because eventually it's going to be someone who's not your person. Can you trust they aren't going to misuse your technology?
Yep. We are now in tit-for-tat politics now. The Republicans cheated Obama and the democrats out of their Supreme Court nomination and now the court is conservative - and I see another justice being a conservative one.
The Evangelical Christians have bullied their beliefs into our government and it doesn't help that Liberals can't be bothered to vote: I gotta admire the Reps for their ability to mobilize their sheep - I mean their base.
And as a society, we will be paying for the Trump's administrations actions long after Trump and all those old Fox News watching white conservatives are dust. All because their sheep - base, damit I did it again! - are triggered easily with "Israel", "baby killing Democrats", "MS13", "MUslims", "Sharia law", Immigrants", "gays", "Jesus", "guns" .... what sucks for us is that none of those issues matter to them. They are old and are going to be DEAD soon. Father Time is their true enemy.
In the meantime, the rest of us are struggling with student loans because we fell for the myth that education is worth every penny - and spare me the meme of "only the Russian Lit majors are struggling." Have a CS degree from state and not a top school? Sorry, good luck finding a job in your field - if you are lucky, it'll probably involve asking, "Having you tried turning it off and on again?" Or it'll be a boring, tedious, dead end job in test.
And then there is healthcare. All those old conservatives who hate government sure do LOVE their Medicare. But they don't want it for all of us because they listen to liars on Fox News that tells them that it's Socialism when applied to all and if they did, they'd lose theirs.
The Republicans are going to be the ones who want to cut Medicare and Social Security because "fiscal responsibility"!
The only thing that's making me happy is the people in the flyover states who voted for Trump bitching and moaning how Trump's policies are hurting them. And I enjoyed the hypocrisy when Trump gave them that huge bailout. "Other people's money" indeed!
If you don't like the companies actions you own a small part of (via your stock), you may file a proposal, and you win or lose (usually lose), and then if company continues actions not to your liking, you sell the stock and move on.
If you don't like the companies action you are employed by, you may petition, and you win or lose (usually lose), and then if the company continues actions not to your liking, you leave the company and move on.
As a kid (just like any kid) I asked why. Why is the sky blue. Why is water wet.
I never stopped asking that question. The reason has changed. At work I ask it, so I can figure out a way to make it easier for them AND for me.
For reporting it is nice to know if they want to increase or decrease FTE count. That way I can dig up extra information that can come in handy and/or present the same numbers in a different way.
For a website it is good to know if they want more or less contacts. Having asked these questions a lot, they will know to expect them and understand that answering them will be benefitial for both.
Now if you only look at what was asked and do only that, you will not only create a "do as I expect, not as I say" mentelaty, you will have no say in the matter and need to clean up a lot of shit afterwards.
Do if you start asking the question 'why' now, you are several decades to late.
And yes, more than once I have save the company a shitload of money. Also: not all companies work that way. Draw yoru own conclusions in that case.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
because that's where surveilance happens, and that's what American tech workers are worried about. Because the greatest surveilance and police state the world has ever seen, America, has never ever conducted any surveilance. None at all. Even when they spend as much as the rest of the world does combined. None.
I think this is one instance of a more general problem. People are getting more of a peek behind the curtain through social media, constant news coverage and the fact that politicians seem to telegraph their decisions through Twitter. IMO if we do end up destroying the US as we know it, historians are going to point to social media as a big driving force. People are seeing how the sausage is made and they don't like it. Corruption used to be hidden and although it sucks, it is and always will be the way things are done. Do you really think the president personally vetted his Supreme Court pick? No way, I assume the party bosses told him in some unofficial way, "You will put this guy in place or we'll make sure you don't get re-elected and nothing you want will get done." Remember, people didn't used to see any of this...their information sources were limited and investigative journalism wasn't very investigative when it came to sensitive topics.
I'm a little surprised that the average tech worker wouldn't make the logical leap that the same facial recognition phone unlocking algorithm can be used to reliably track people in a crowded city. How did people working for defense contractors during the Cold War and Vietnam Wars feel about building technology that was much more overtly deadly?
Awesome. more money for me! The fewer people there are competing for my job, the more money I can make. So, to all the snowflakes I say, "go ahead! Grit your teeth and stamp your feet all you want! The surveillance state and the bombs are still going to get built, and people will make a lot more money doing it, which by the way will come out of your taxes, so you're going to participate in the defense of your freedom whether you like it or not."
It's OK to use facial recognition as a convenient way to unlock your phone, but not to track you when you walk down the street.
It's OK to use facial recognition as a way to find friends by the pictures they post, but not to track your known associates in defying the government.
The tech is the same, just who uses it. If you want to object to selling it to China, why didn't you object to doing it for InstaFaceTwits?
I think that's kind of the point - it DOES matter what it is being used for. Granted, you can't control how it's used after it's been created, but if you are developing something like facial recognition you KNOW it will be used for nefarious reasons at some point.
There are all kinds of things like this that I refuse to use - facial recognition, fingerprint readers, facebook, smart devices that monitor you (Echo, fitbit, etc.) My location on my phone is turned off, unless I need to use it. Webcams are unplugged when not in use. I'm not naive enough to think that I am still not being tracked by Google et al because we do live in the digital age. But I am not about just to give up all information about myself freely for goofy convenience.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It is time. This society has long had industries and companies that are a stigma to place on a resume. Big tech needs to be tops on that list.
What is worse? Making a website that shows naked people? Or enabling totalitarianism?
When you find out that your project is being used for evil, use it to make popcorn.
Fight Spammers!
While we certainly need freedom and protection against powerful interests, we also need technologies for offensive and defensive, including true military, use.
Russia, China, and various others exist that are not our friends. The consistently seek advantageous against us. We cannot pretend that we are not in a game of conquest when others around us most certainly are. That is just a fact.
Why do SJW types dig into the ethics of AI without actually knowing anything about it? This article reads like someone made a library or contributed to a service that customers use but they feel butt hurt that one customer might be the government. The less dramatic approach might be to stay at at Google, it being a top AI firm, and use the knowledge in the next election. After all Hillary Clinton might have won the election with a few more visits to the rust belt. However that assumes one actually knows anything about AI in the first place.
Shit attempt Ivan, no ruples for you.
You canâ(TM)t get anywhere near as fat a paycheck outside just a handful of companies like Google, FB, Netflix and MS/Amazon, but the latter two only pay well if youâ(TM)re very senior (director and up). Between a $100k pay bump and doing something ethnically dubious, 99.999% of people will pick the former. Thatâ(TM)s why during each of the ethics shitstorms only a handful employees depart, and half of those were on their way out anyway.
Rewrote the sentence ruined the meaning: should be âoebetween $100k pay bump and NOT doing something ethically dubiousâ.
Fat? If by fat you mean:
Barely able to pay rent in the Bay Area.
These people are selling you out for scraps.
I don't know where the hell you're looking, but $100k developer jobs are a dime a dozen. I'm a software hiring manager. If you can't find more than just Google, FB, Netflix and Amazon, you're not looking.
Just another day in Paradise
I got that fat paycheck at an owner funded startup at my last job, and got even more at my next non-big tech job.
Nobody has to take a job doing shit that erodes the social contract. Anybody who does deserves to have big tech be their last career move:
Just as another data point, we at SpaceX see a similar trend chasing miltary funding with the satellite constellation Starlink. Originally it was sold to employees as a mission to democratize web access for the world, now it's a defacto backhaul service for a future Trump's Space Force. I don't think the project would have attracted talent if that was the ostensive purpose, and we are losing some people as the focus muddies.
Same might happen for Mars mission.. I'm not so sure about Elon's 'lodestar'.
Hey it's fine if you atone by retiring at 35 to do some bullshit charity work, in between yoga classes and wheatgrass smoothies!
Only the generation touched by the hand of God would pursue something simply to demonstrate their personal brilliance rather than having some sort of true north in mind that, y'know, actually benefits others in a way that is not defined by their own mushroom-headed little parameters. Seriously: everything would improve instantly if American millennials were eliminated from the mix. Everything.
Why?
Because the outraged will end up building something even worse - being blinded by their outrage.
Because those who do actually care will be replaced by someone who doesn't - one of the purposes of outsourcing/H1B.
Is there no hope? Probably not - the world has reached critical mass of evil + idiots.
If you work for Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. then the answer is simple, you are building:
- Ads
- Something that grossly invades people's privacy
- It does this for the sole purpose of transferring, not wealth, because there is none of that left, but debt enslavement, not for the existing generation because they are over-leveraged already, but for your children's children.
- The mechanisms are psychological warfare
- You are essentially finding new ways to get people to empty their wallets without thinking about it or realizing it
congratulations. You are the problem.
in order to be "cleansed" of the company they worked for? That's highly doubtful?!
These companies are out to make a profit for their shareholders and they hire the best talent possible for the best price.
$100k yes, $300-500k -- not so much. That's how much people are making at Google.