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: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 14 2017, @06:56PM (1 child)
Frequently, yes, but a lot of it also comes from people who are simply religious zealots. When was the last time you heard of an strongly anti-gay atheist?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:41PM
You'd be amazed. I know for example of a few extremely hardcore "pro-life" atheists, who use basically every single bad argument their religious bretheren do aside from "God doesn't like it." Seeing through one delusion doesn't mean seeing through all of them. I'm also not an atheist, I just don't believe that God cares whether or not anyone believes in It.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...