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from the sniff-sniff-I-have-a-very-bad-code dept.
Speaking at the Noisebridge hackerspace Tuesday evening, Chelsea Manning implored a crowd of makers, nerds, and developers to be ethical coders.
"As a coder, I know that you can build a system and it works, but you're thinking about the immediate result, you're not thinking about that this particular code could be misused, or it could be used in a different manner," she said, as part of a conversation with Noisebridge co-founder Mitch Altman.
Altman began the conversation by asking about artificial intelligence and underscoring some of the risks in that field.
"We're now using huge datasets with all kinds of personal data, that we don't even know what information we're putting out there and what it's getting collected for," Manning said. "Our AI systems are getting better and better and better, and we don't know what the social consequences of that are. The code that we write, the bias that you see in some of the systems that you see, we don't know if we're causing feedback loops with those kinds of bias."
[...] "The tools that you make for marketing can also be used to kill people," Manning continued. "We have an obligation to think of the tools that we're making and how we're using them and not just churn out code for whatever reason. You want to think about how your end-user could misuse your code."
Guns don't kill people, code kills people.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:33PM
I'd agree with most of your remark in general.
I'd disagree slightly with "anything that's a positive" in that sophistry can game anything into being good or bad although on average in a realistic assessment is probably what you're aiming for.
WRT to fields I've mostly worked in public utilities and it can be rewarding. I always enjoyed doing things to help the operations / field circus people the most, which usually helps the customers too. Lets change some TPS report headers also happened, and was never rewarding.
My favorite Army reserves sgt was a civil engineer and his pay was awful compared to mine but he really loved infrastructure work.