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."

Comments

some people code to make money

[Anonymous Coward]

Most software programmers I know are coding to make money. Making humankind better is not on there agenda.

Re:some people code to make money

[iggymanz]

pointless anyway, humankind will not be "made better" by any amount or type of software.

Re:some people code to make money

[bobbied]

Most software programmers I know are coding to make money. Making humankind better is not on there agenda.

The implication being that making money is contrary to helping mankind better?

I don't think these two are logically related. You can make money and be out to make humankind better. You can make money by cheating the next guy out of his, making human kind less well off. Further, You can make money and not care. The two concepts are not related.

Now if you are arguing that a lot of folks don't give a flip about others in today's self absorbed world, I'm going to say welcome to reality. History is rife with examples of such bad behavior.

Re:some people code to make money

[Anonymous Coward]

It can sure be made worse by software though.

Re:some people code to make money

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people design and build houses for money. They have responsibilities towards the clients and the society in general, inscribed into law and regulations, to create a better environment and promote goals of the society as it sees fit at the time of design and construction.

Re:some people code to make money

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that you should look into the business ethics model that most business people are taught in school.
It comes from the Chicago School of economics, with Milton Friedman as the main proponent.

It says that their highest ethical responsibility is to 'Enhance shareholder value"
Of course, to an MBA that is measured in dollars.

So, the end result is that business people will pursue money first, and will break laws, and work AGAINST the needs of the community, as long as it makes them more money.

You can see the efforts to lower legal penalties for misbehavior and propagandize people to accept this sort of behavior as normal, as a continuation of these ideas

Re:some people code to make money

[Tailhook]

Home builders build houses for profit. Full stop.

They comply with laws and regulations. Compliance, however, is not their motivation. Relying on a home builder to adopt these other matters as their motivation is folly. That's why we have building codes and inspectors to enforce them. If we could rely on home builders to promulgate all our supposedly good goals we wouldn't maintain codes or employ inspectors and instead use the money to bump city manager bonuses.

Relying on the vaunted wisdom of Tim Berners-Lee and the good graces of giant corporations — populated by their "armies" of imported coders, managers and executives most of whom have zero clue who Tim Berners-Lee is or why they should listen to him, having gotten off the boat a decade or more after TBL last mattered — is likewise folly.

Re:some people code to make money

[AmiMoJo]

The software that runs MRI scanners makes humankind better. The software that lets us communicate securely or encrypt our personal data makes humankind better. The software that allows us to understand our own DNA makes humankind better. The software that took us to the moon made humankind better.

Re:some people code to make money

[cowpie]

Disagree. People can make the world better or worse. They might choose to use software or not to achieve their goals, but in any case, software is just a tool used by people.

You can write software for a company that has the best of intentions, but stuff happens. Perhaps down the road some other people end up in charge of that intellectual property and do things that are bad for humanity with it. Your software didn't suddenly go from good to bad, but it was just a tool used first by well-intentioned people and later my ill-intentioned people.

People make moral choices. Software does not.

Re:some people code to make money

[bobbied]

It says that their highest ethical responsibility is to 'Enhance shareholder value"

Shareholder value is NOT enhanced by unethical or immoral behavior by a company or it's employees. Both Civil and Criminal penalties are expensive. Civil damages can cost many times more than the ill gotten gains and Criminal fines can seriously hurt a companies profitability.

Do some get away with such things? For awhile perhaps... Emron was such a company, but eventually they got caught and now where are they? Their share holder value is ZERO now and many of their principles have served time.

Re:some people code to make money

[Hognoxious]

Shareholder value is NOT enhanced by unethical or immoral behavior by a company or it's[sic] employees.

It is if they don't get caught.

Heck, it sometimes is if they *do* get caught. Naughty naughty, take a slap to wrist!

Re:some people code to make money

[iggymanz]

No, not talking about curing a disease.

Talking about mankind and improving it.

we've had more war and atrocities from the century that brought us MRI than any other. Humanity is getting worse.

Wikipedia super bad example

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Wikipedia super bad example

[bobbied]

You act as if that's a bad thing. I mean, how do you think the Linux Kernel has made it this far? Talk about a cabal of zealots... Yet good things have come from that.

Re:Wikipedia super bad example

[UnknownSoldier]

Agreed.

Their bullshit "No Trivia" section just proves how clueless / out-of/touch-of-reality they are.

One mans's trivia is another man's data.

**I** decide what information has value -- not you. I personally **like** finding out who has cameos, etc. in movies.

Re:Wikipedia super bad example

[TuringTest]

That's what Wikia is for.

Re:Wikipedia super bad example

[TuringTest]

Aaaaand that's the reason it works (sort of). Compare it to h2g2, the collaborative encyclopedia that predated it, to see what you get when anything goes.

Re:Wikipedia super bad example

[painandgreed]

You act as if that's a bad thing. I mean, how do you think the Linux Kernel has made it this far? Talk about a cabal of zealots... Yet good things have come from that.

It's a matter of presentation. Wikipedia presents itself as being open to anybody to edit and used that as leverage to goad people into getting to give them money as a matter of sympathy. However, it seems that plenty of people who try to contribute as expected by the way they are told to with valuable information, find they cannot because of administration issues. AFAIK, Linux does not present itself as letting anybody edit the base code and telling them it's ok to do so. Likewise, Wikipedia doesn't present itself as a a walled garden that will vet any submissions.

Missing the forest for the trees

[apoc.famine]

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.

Re:Missing the forest for the trees

[Immerman]

>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.

Of course there's something ethical about that - you're building part of a machine, and as such you carry partial responsibility for the existence and use of that machine. If the machine is intended to be used for the detriment of humanity, don't help build it. If it's *already* being used for the detriment of humanity, don't help maintain or upgrade it. Or at least own up to the moral responsibility for your actions.

Now, if you're writing a public library, and some of the users of that library use it as part of something evil, that's one thing. But so far as I know, the majority of modern programming is still done in-house. Which means that your library was probably built in-house, in service to the "evil master plan", and you can't duck moral responsibility by saying that that part *you* did wasn't actually evil when taken in isolation.

Re:Missing the forest for the trees

[UnknownSoldier]

Agree 100% !

To paraphrase / quote a famous cliche:

You were too busy trying to figure out How that you never stopped to ask Why.

Science by definition is amoral. Most of programming is too since you are just implementing a Mathematical (*) function. There is no ethics involved.

(*) For sake of argument (and simplicity) programming is a higher level order of calculus then Mathematics since it is a combination of Logic, Pattern Recognition, Mathematics, Linguistics, Art and a few other disciplines I'm probably missing.

Re:Missing the forest for the trees

[apoc.famine]

If the machine is intended to be used for the detriment of humanity, don't help build it.

So coders are now required to be psychics, eh?

There's no real way to tell most of the time if the code you're working on is going to be used for good or ill in the future. If you're the one engineering the whole system, sure, you know. But if you're just a code monkey? No way to tell.

Even if you knew that it was going to be used to some detriment, the question then would be what percent of the time it will be used for ill, and what percent of the time it will be used for good. And then where you draw that personal line? Saying "I'll only work on this if I have a guarantee that it's 100% pure angel magic" is utterly unrealistic.

You seem to think the world is black and white, and everyone has full knowledge of everything. That's really not the case.

Re:Missing the forest for the trees

[Kjella]

Science by definition is amoral. Most of programming is too since you are just implementing a Mathematical (*) function. There is no ethics involved.

I work in a healthcare, you should tell the ethics board that because they seem to think using patient data and experimenting on people has moral implications. I'm sure Dr. Mengele will appreciate having his name cleared too. The distinction you're trying to make is between the generic and the specific. The engineer who designed the gas valve that was used in Auschwitz probably just made a valve, but other engineers designed the whole camp and knew what it was for. Same with making a sort function, some other programmer will write "foreach <Prisoner p> in <Camp> sort by strength descending, if workcamp.size() < 100 then p.toWorkcamp() else p.toGasChamber()". I think very many of us work enough with business objects or know the overall objectives of the project/company that we can't really claim ignorance about what it's for. If not, well ignorance is bliss.

Re:Missing the forest for the trees

[fish_in_the_c]

So, no one should write TCP IP code because it is used to distribute child porn?
And we should all work on solving trajectory optimization so we can effectively defend our country without putting solders in harms way?

Few tools are black and white in their use.

Re:Missing the forest for the trees

[UnknownSoldier]

Scientist !== Science

Engineer !== Science

A good engineer ALSO has morals. A bad one doesn't.

/sarcasm Gee, if only there was a way to lookup the definition of Science: ...

the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

Or, https://www.merriam-webster.co...

1. the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding
2. a) department of systematized knowledge as an object of study
2. b) something (such as a sport or technique) that may be studied or learned like systematized knowledge
3. a) knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method
3. b) such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena
4. a system or method reconciling practical ends with scientific laws

Or, https://sciencecouncil.org/abo...

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence

Scientific methodology includes the following:

* Objective observation: Measurement and data (possibly although not necessarily using mathematics as a tool)
* Evidence
* Experiment and/or observation as benchmarks for testing hypotheses
* Induction: reasoning to establish general rules or conclusions drawn from facts or examples
* Repetition
* Critical analysis
* Verification and testing: critical exposure to scrutiny, peer review and assessment

Morals are mentioned WHERE again ???

Hint: They AREN'T.

Re:Missing the forest for the trees

[AmiMoJo]

You can't be "consciously grappling with ethical choices" while you're implementing a sort function.

I was once asked to add webcam functionality to some software. I had to refuse on the grounds that it was an unwarranted invasion of privacy, and my boss accepted my argument.

A few months later I noticed that the people using the equipment had put electrical tape over the webcam anyway.

Re:Missing the forest for the trees

[ortholattice]

For sake of argument (and simplicity) programming is a higher level order of calculus then Mathematics since it is a combination of Logic, Pattern Recognition, Mathematics, Linguistics, Art and a few other disciplines I'm probably missing.

I'm not quite sure I understand what you are saying here, but computer science is a small subset of mathematics as commonly understood, which is the collection of theorems derivable from the axioms of (typically) ZFC set theory. (See wikip. under "ZFC set theory", the website metamath.org, and many other places.) In particular, of those axioms you probably don't need Infinity, Foundation, Replacement, or Choice for (most of) computer science. Logic is a prerequisite for ZFC set theory and thus mathematics, so it isn't "higher level order". And if you're going to throw in Art, you might as well throw in Ethics.

Re:Missing the forest for the trees

[Immerman]

Very little work is creating new systems - most of it is maintenance, in which case you can probably already find out a great deal about how it's already being used.

You can also observe your employer to see how ethically they use the tools already at their disposal. Yours will after all be used no more ethically than those.

It's getting a bit more indirect, but you can also look at how they value the well-being of their employees - after all it's probably more than they value that of the general populace.

There's also a question of... call it corruptibility. If you help build something extremely powerful, and that power can be exploited for evil - it eventually will be. Power reliably attracts the worst sort of people, and tempts even best. So if you're building such a powerful tool you must constantly ask yourself: how can this be used for evil? And how much good is it realistically likely to offer? And how does that stack up against how much evil will it inevitably enable?

Every choice in life is a weighing of the benefits against the prices that will be paid - and you never really have the whole picture. That doesn't mean you throw away the oars oars and disclaim all responsibility for where you're end up. You make the best choices you can in light of the information available, and you live with the consequences. There may not be easy answers, but you should at least ask the questions, and decided whether you honestly believe the inevitable blood on your hands will be worth it.

Re: Moscow Donald's Terrorist Tard Army

[Anonymous Coward]

Knock it off. Your posts are harmful.

Based on the targets, the most likely scenario would appear to be an act of right wing terrorism.

Americans are far too polarized and the rhetoric is far too divisive. That only promotes anger and encourages this type of behavior. You could have condemned this act of apparent terrorism without blaming all Trump supporters. Rhetoric like yours actually has the potential to incite violence and make the situation worse.

You should be ashamed of yourself for posting that.

Tim-Berners lee is out of touch...

[blahplusplus]

... 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.

Re:Tim-Berners lee is out of touch...

[Raenex]

Slashdot needs a -1, "Get off my lawn" moderation.

Re:Tim-Berners lee is out of touch...

[blahplusplus]

Except the number one OS (linux, it all it's variations) is very much not in the single controlled hands of a corporation.

Sure, we can say, hey the masses won, let's stop fighting and join the sheep or go live on a deserted island or you can try to create some change.
You can start by doing small things (like getting your friends to move to Signal instead of Whatsapp) and try to educate them.

But of course you can always roll over and keep on complaining.

Ahh yes the linux idealists, you're out of your mind if you think linux can replace windows. Windows as an OS is basically a utility because everyone and their mother develops for it. I'm sure all the cool kids will stop playing gacha mobile games on android/smartphones, stop playing mmo's and "live service based" games like Assassins creed just to jump to linux.

Sorry to tell ya but linux ever wants to break out it's minority it's going to have to software everyone watns to use for it being made for it by billion dollar companies.

Re:Tim-Berners lee is out of touch...

[TeknoHog]

Ahh yes the linux idealists, you're out of your mind if you think linux can replace windows. Windows as an OS is basically a utility because everyone and their mother develops for it. I'm sure all the cool kids will stop playing gacha mobile games on android/smartphones, stop playing mmo's and "live service based" games like Assassins creed just to jump to linux.

Sorry to tell ya but linux ever wants to break out it's minority it's going to have to software everyone watns to use for it being made for it by billion dollar companies.

News flash: Android is just another Linux distro. Maybe not GNU/Linux but a Linux nevertheless.

Re:Tim-Berners lee is out of touch...

[blahplusplus]

News flash: Android is just another Linux distro. Maybe not GNU/Linux but a Linux nevertheless.

Man you really are a fucking moron, Android is linux no doubt about it, but it's a fucking closed platform. That releases software you don't own or control.

Re: Moscow Donald's Terrorist Tard Army

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get this straight, you don't like the rhetoric coming from the right. So you respond by... imitating the right.

The rhetoric from Trump and some others on the right is awful. Some on the left have started to respond in kind with their own violent rhetoric. It's not helpful from either side.

You have no moral high ground.

By the way, unlike you, I do not want to accuse everyone on the right or everyone on the left of condoning divisive rhetoric and violence.

Don't be a hypocrite. If you don't like Trump's behavior, then you certainly shouldn't imitate it.

TBL's solution:

[Snufu]

More DRM.