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Tim Berners-Lee on the Huge Sociotechnical Design Challenge (techcrunch.com)
In a speech discussing ethics and the Internet, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has tasked the technology industry and its coder army with paying continuous attention to the world their software is consuming as they go about connecting humanity through technology. From a report: Coding must mean consciously grappling with ethical choices in addition to architecting systems that respect core human rights like privacy, he suggested. "Ethics, like technology, is design," he told delegates at the 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners (ICDPPC) which is taking place in Brussels this week. "As we're designing the system, we're designing society. Ethical rules that we choose to put in that design [impact the society]... Nothing is self evident. Everything has to be put out there as something that we think we will be a good idea as a component of our society." If your tech philosophy is the equivalent of 'move fast and break things' it's a failure of both imagination and innovation to not also keep rethinking policies and terms of service -- "to a certain extent from scratch" -- to account for fresh social impacts, he argued in the speech.
He pointed to how Wikipedia had to rapidly adapt its policies after putting online the power for anyone to edit its encyclopedia, noting: "They introduced a whole lot of bureaucracy around it but that actually makes it work, and it ended up be coming very functional." He described today's digital platforms as "sociotechnical systems" -- meaning "it's not just about the technology when you click on the link it is about the motivation someone has to make such a great thing because then they are read and the excitement they get just knowing that other people are reading the things that they have written."
He pointed to how Wikipedia had to rapidly adapt its policies after putting online the power for anyone to edit its encyclopedia, noting: "They introduced a whole lot of bureaucracy around it but that actually makes it work, and it ended up be coming very functional." He described today's digital platforms as "sociotechnical systems" -- meaning "it's not just about the technology when you click on the link it is about the motivation someone has to make such a great thing because then they are read and the excitement they get just knowing that other people are reading the things that they have written."
Most software programmers I know are coding to make money. Making humankind better is not on there agenda.
Wikipedia is in control of a cabal of zealots that you cannot get even a single word change in any page of significance without proving you "belong"
Think of any movie you have every seen where small groups have been isolated from civilization for thousands of years, that is what little fiefdoms of controlling Wikipedia editors are like at this point.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Coding must mean consciously grappling with ethical choices ...He pointed to how Wikipedia had to rapidly adapt its policies after putting online the power for anyone to edit its encyclopedia, noting: "They introduced a whole lot of bureaucracy around it but that actually makes it work, and it ended up be coming very functional."
Coding is nothing like editing Wikipedia.
You can't be "consciously grappling with ethical choices" while you're implementing a sort function. Maybe that sort function is going to determine which sick child gets priority treatment, or maybe that sort function will figure out which sick child costs too much, and another routine will try to get rid of the kid. If a coder is going too far down the rabbit hole trying to figure out how every last hunk of code will be used, they're no longer just a coder.
If the summary had quotes from TBL about software engineering, architecture, or design it would be a lot more insightful. But a whole lot of code is making function foo handle variable X correctly. There's nothing ethical or unethical in that. It just is.
Code is a tool. And like any tool, it can be used for good or ill. Placing the focus there rather than on the larger design and decision systems seems really dumb to me. Of course, the article might go into these things, but ain't nobody got time for that.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
... the war was won as soon as stupid people got internet. The last 20 years from around 1999 on, I watched as software and games went from something we owned to something corporations controlled. The average person is downright fucking retard level stupid about their puchasing, this is why we have mmo's/f2p/online drm, diablo 3 with single player lag, microtransactions, lootboxes in overwatch even though ALL the content in overwatch already exists in files on your hard drive just inaccessable. A fucking lootbox interface on a game where all the content is already on your drive. We live in a full blown idiocracy here. Windows 10 is the the finishing touch.
To think that Microsoft, game and tech companies got all they wanted in the 90's simply by waiting for the stupid masses to get internet and the masses being idiots would just give it all away. The last 20 years for me have been surreal as a child of the 80's and 90's. I didn't know the future of PC gaming in 1998 would end up in total software theft and removal of games from gamers because the average gamer is such a fucking moron.
Mr Lee is living in some fantasy land inside his head, all the big content companies are moving in to control and sheer the sheep and the sheep are all too happy to bend over and give up their rights and freedoms.