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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.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:05PM (2 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:05PM (#568017)

    I used to try and recommend this site to people but can't anymore.
    I don't want it to reflect poorly on myself

    Exactly. In fact, I don't recommend *any* discussion site any more, except perhaps Reddit if they're looking for a very particular non-tech niche. I wouldn't recommend any tech news site, at all: they're all like this, full of insane right-wing rantings, anti-gay bigotry, religious idiocy, etc. It's weird, in my 20s I never realized that techies (esp. engineers) were highly correlated with religious nuts, but as I've gotten older I've definitely noticed it. I read an article about 9 years ago that talked about a high correlation between engineers and terrorists, pointing out that many Islamic terrorists came from an engineering background (Osama bin Laden was an engineer for instance). But it absolutely makes sense: there's not only a high degree of religiosity among engineers, but a very severe form of black-and-white thinking, which of course leads to extremism. It isn't far from there to being a terrorist.

    So around my non-tech friends/family I may mention something I saw on a tech news site, but I won't name the site and certainly wouldn't recommend that they peruse it. They'd probably think I was some kind of extremist or bigot. You're right, these places are embarrassing; you'd think that a bunch of people who studied science in college would be generally scientific-thinking, but there's no shortage of climate change deniers and even Moon landing deniers and Creationists among engineers.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @10:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @10:45PM (#568120)

    I'm pro-science, anti-religion, and yet I'm almost all those other things that you hate. I'll grant you the Moon landing.

    MAGA

    FYI about the climate change: It is certain that humans have some effect. The evidence that this effect is severe or undesirable is weak and tainted. Even if we were clearly causing ourselves severe troubles, ignoring the problem might be a rational choice. This is because the proposed solutions are expensive, not likely to be effective, and certain to be cheated on by other nations. If I wanted to make a dent in the problem, I'd start by nuking about 6 billion non-Americans in order to reduce demand for fossil fuel.

  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @10:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @10:46PM (#568121)

    And even worse, none of those crazy idiots are tolerant like us Superior Liberals! We need to purge them all in the spirit of togetherness and brotherhood. No longer will we sit idly by while crimethink runs rampant among the proles.