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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @03:05PM (1 child)
"Island two has the following law: do what you want as long as it does not prevent everybody else to do what they want."
Depends on the basis the magistrate uses for defining "what I want" is. Freedom is a synonym for individual sovereignty. Which in the U.S. is, by precedent, subordinate to private institutional sovereignty in many ways.
Which is to say, that in the real world, the legal definition of "what I want" scales based on who you are. Remember that if it is a "law", your not the one who gets to write it. And much of law is bench law. Which means it wasn't ever written to begin with. GPL doesn't address that. If you can't rely on the law, then your argument is irrelevant.
Can we rely on the law? If so why are there so many lawyers?
There are abuses of the public trust that GPL and most FOSS licenses don't address. I.P. law is equally silent. In some cases criminal law applies, but courts have not to date demonstrated an understanding that EEE is a problem (not just for developers, but for the economy as a whole). So there is no precedent. And criminal law is broad and obtuse anyway making it unlikely to be enforced. That leaves only civil law.
You are assuming that there is a law for all problems involving the usurpation of civil rights or freedom. There isn't. That is why we have civil courts in the first place. You only have those rights that you defend. GPL and other FOSS licenses choose to defend some rights, but there are many they choose not to defend.
Apl chooses to defend more rights. And while the approach used to defend them sucks, it is the only approach that I've found that has a snowballs chance in hell of being enforceable. Do better. PLEASE do better. I have no interest in maintaining this thing. I didn't do this because I wanted to. I did it because of a need. Others probably do as well, so I decided to make it public. YMMV.
Choose to defend against malicious use, or don't. It is entirely up to you.
JMA.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday September 19 2017, @12:29PM
Interesting, but my point was simply "less restrictions != less freedom".
Account abandoned.