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posted by
martyb
on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:04PM
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.
Earlier this week, a post written by programmer and teacher Bill Sourour went viral. It's called "Code I'm Still Ashamed Of."
In it he recounts a horrible story of being a young programmer who landed a job building a website for a pharmaceutical company. The whole post is worth a read, but the upshot is he was duped into helping the company skirt drug advertising laws in order to persuade young women to take a particular drug.
He later found out the drug was known to worsen depression and at least one young woman committed suicide while taking it. He found out his sister was taking the drug and warned her off it.
By sake of comparison, take a look at the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (Adopted by ACM Council 10/16/92.)
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Programmers Talk About the Unethical and Illegal Things They’ve Been Asked To Do
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* m2 stares at the monitor... it looks like a hamburger...
m2 - that's a bad sign
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @12:07AM
Don't ignore the progress that's been made.
One of the biggest 'unknown' success stories of the last 40 years is the 70% reduction of people living in extreme poverty. [businessinsider.com]
Its gone from 2.2 billion to 0.7 billion. All while the total population nearly doubled.
That is just an insane reduction in human suffering. Its hard to overstate just how much lives have been improved. And it is reasonable to believe that extreme poverty will be completely eliminated in another couple of decades. The UN hopes to do it by 2030.
TL;DR chart [netdna-cdn.com]
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday November 23 2016, @02:34PM
I see no evidence that these advances in society are a result of software. If anything, this data points to the advances that communist China and the third world have made following the end of US suppression activities and normalizing of relations around 1970. Which is not a point I am interested in making or arguing on behalf of. The point I'd like to make is that any advances appear to be outside of the US and the rest of the western world we live in. Interesting though that there was a temporary bump in extreme poverty around 1990
Considering though that the vast majority of people lived in "extreme poverty" for most of that chart, I find myself questioning the metric. And that metric is...earning more than $1.25 per day. How perfectly tied to our individual happiness. Assuming they have corrected that value for inflation and currency differences (which is a big assumption), how does that compare to the rising cost of living? Does that number reflect the fact that shelter is more expensive now than it ever has been? That arable land is more scarce every year? That people more and more have to rely on that daily income for sustenance instead of personal agriculture, hunting, and scavenging? We may now look back on sustenance farming as primitive and risky and call it "extreme poverty", but those people were often happy regardless. Can you say the same of their children working (and living) in Foxconn's factories? And even Foxconn is generally better than the alternatives. What about the textile sweatshops?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by lizardloop on Wednesday November 23 2016, @02:39PM
Yes. Whilst we are definitely helping the 1% get richer we are at the same time massively increasing productivity which puts more wealth in to society overall. How that wealth is distributed really boils down to your political preferences.