Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Thursday September 14 2017, @12:44PM   Printer-friendly
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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 14 2017, @06:53PM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday September 14 2017, @06:53PM (#568007)

    DIY doesn't really work for stuff like this, mainly because these devices are all closed and proprietary. Sure, it'd be pretty cool if you could connect these devices to your home server, which you can then access remotely with your smartphone. But there's a lot of engineering involved there, and standards are required. Who's going to do that? You need some server software, which of course could be a Linux distro, but you also need a smartphone app, which would have to be on F-droid since the Play Store doesn't have FOSS. All this means only enthusiasts are going to bother, because we're already in territory that's much too difficult for non-technical people to bother with (e.g., setting up their phone to access F-droid, getting a PC and installing a Linux distro). But the missing link is being able to interface with the devices. You're not going to build your own washing machine obviously, so you need to modify an existing one to connect to your server using some API. It's all closed and proprietary, so that's not easy, plus every device is different, every manufacturer has totally different protocols, and they're changing every time they come out with a new model. Who's going to go to that much trouble for a washing machine? We still don't have great coverage for the FOSS Android builds like LineageOS (it's only available for certain models), and that's arguably far more useful than being able to remote-control your washer.

    The home server thing is a good idea; it'd be great to have a Linux server under your own control, controlling your lights, thermostat, securicams, etc., but this would require companies in many different sectors to cooperate on open standards for this, and these companies have zero incentive to do so; they'd rather connect to their own cloud servers so they can track you, and consumers simply are not going to insist on the FOSS route as they're too stupid and/or don't care.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday September 14 2017, @08:53PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 14 2017, @08:53PM (#568079) Journal

    You are, of course, right. I never said all consumers will DIY. I only said:
    1. is not that hard to start tinkering
    2. I think that LoT makes more sense than IoT (on the line of: "Here's an idea")

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford