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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: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 14 2017, @07:21PM
Maybe a petty point, but you're mixing STEM with IT. STEM includes *all* technical and scientific fields, *including* medicine.
I don't believe this is correct. STEM, as the word is used in society and politics, doesn't seem to involve medicine at all; when people are complaining about the lack of women in STEM, they sure as hell don't mean medicine because there is no lack of women in medicine (in fact, it's the opposite, they probably outnumber men by a significant amount; even if you concentrate on doctors and overlook nurses, they're probably at parity). "STEM" is science, technology, engineering, mathematics. Medicine really isn't in there, even though it makes a lot of use of science. But plumbers make use of science and technology too, and no one considers plumbers to be STEM workers. Auto mechanics most certainly use technology in their work, but again they are not STEM workers. The medical researchers at pharma companies are part of the "S" in STEM, but the doctors who prescribe pharma drugs are not.
And IT is part of STEM, it's in the "T". You could argue that they're like plumbers and mechanics, but these definitions have political and sociological aspects to them, and in current usage IT is considered part of STEM whether it's technically correct or not.
Helping companies manage their businesses better, whether by setting up their PCs or writing them useful business software.
I'm sorry, I don't think I've ever seen *anyone* claim that enterprise software is anything besides a synonym for "crap". Heck, I was in a doctor's office waiting room a couple years ago, and a commercial for some enterprise software (SAP I think) came on, and some older lady, who I never would have guessed to be an IT worker, started bitching and swearing about what a piece of shit their software was.
Those same companies need an online presence, which also needs to be secured.
So they can advertise and track people more?
Heck, the entire IoT world has massive potential to make people's lives better, if only we can figure how to make it secure, and to keep the marketeers from sticking their noses into people's private lives.
That's impossible. There's no profit in setting up IoT in a way that doesn't involve invading peoples' privacy. IoT necessarily works by sending your private data to some cloud server that the manufacturer operates. If they do something nefarious with your data, you have no recourse; if they get hacked, your data is released to even more nefarious people. And if they shut down the service because the device is "old", your device stops working. There is nothing good about IoT, and there never will be. It could theoretically be done usefully and in a privacy-respecting manner (by letting you have your own home Linux server and communicating with the IoT devices through open APIs), but that will never happen because mfgrs won't profit that way, and consumers are too stupid to demand that. Consumers are still so dumb they happily use Windows 10 despite it being common knowledge that it spies on them.
That said, you're right that too large a percentage of IT jobs - especially in the really visible companies - is currently evil.
Exactly, and the ones that aren't blatantly evil, such as making boring CRUD apps for companies, aren't really helping the world any (we had better software decades ago than the bloated web-app enterprise garbage we have now). Smart people who want to actually help humanity, therefore, are ill-advised to go into STEM in the US; they'd be better off going into medicine, or leaving the country and doing STEM work elsewhere.