@mekkaokereke I had to take an ethics class for my MBA and it was laughably bad. Instead of even trying to teach ethics at all, he focused almost entirely on just measuring a company's ethics using some decidedly ill-defined "metrics" he literally made up himself. Nearly all of the material the professor referenced and leveraged in lectures were his own academic papers, and the only thing those referenced were other papers of his. It was by far the most useless course in my entire MBA.
@mekkaokereke I almost took enough Philosophy courses in Uni to get a double CS/Phil major. My experience in those classes didn't encourage me that ethics courses are sufficient for good ethics.
And as an aside, the only professor who paid back royalties for a required book that he wrote was a CS professor. It was only something like $2, but it taught a lot of ethics in just a few minutes.
@mekkaokereke Both the ACM and IEEE (I’m a member of both) have codes of ethics, and I think these are good starting points for discussions of ethics in computer science.
@mekkaokereke When I took a CompSci ethics seminar it was taught by the CS professor and full of white kids asking things like "has affirmative action gone too far?" And telling us they "feel judged" when we definitively answered no, and basically described how anyone asking that is an asshole. But that guy, who is named after a 90s TV show that his parents clearly were a fan of, is still going to go on to be a developer...
🧔🏼♂️"Hey, if I sell these unregulated securities to poor Black people, I can make millions (billions?) of dollars, and leave them holding the bag! Oh but wait... I took an ethics class back at Stanford, so maybe I shouldn't do that?"
I don't think this happens very often in real life. I think what's more likely is:
🧔🏼♂️"I can use that ethics class I took back at Stanford, to make a framework justifying selling crypto! I must think long term, about my billions of AI robot star babies!"
@mekkaokereke Ethics and compliance courses serve exactly one purpose. They keep the people in charge out of trouble once their students/employees do unethical things. “See, we had several ethics courses everybody need’s to take. It’s the employee’s fault, we make money of [insert unethical thing]. What more can we do?”
@mekkaokereke Software ethics won't matter until software liability matters.
I mean, look at all the people who worked on AI ethics and the social impacts of AI for years, and as soon as there was money on the table none of it mattered and their real job that whole time had been placating the consciences of the devs building the tech until it was market-ready. Until privacy, user agency and data ownership laws have teeth, "ethics" courses will matter as much as inspirational office posters.
@mekkaokereke
If you asked my father, a retired financial analyst for one of the big pharma companies, he’d tell you:
“Ethics, in business, means not changing horses midstream.”
There is literally no room for morality in his definition of ethics. Maybe it’s just his own horrible personal opinion, for he is never short of them. But he claims to have been taught it during MBA classes, and it seems to me that Stanford defines ethics similarly.
@mekkaokereke I remember doing comp sci homework in high school next to someone doing homework for their philosophy & ethics elective: we were both surprised to see each was doing the exact same boolean logic tables.
@mekkaokereke When I was a computer science major almost two decades ago, most of my classmates already had open contempt for them minimum of humanities classes we had to take.
@mekkaokereke I went to a bottom of the barrel tech college in Waco, TX, where everyone (including those taking automotive repair courses) were required to take psych classes. They rationalised that it would help with “people skills.”
It was a joke, because most of those motor heads just slept through the classes.
@mekkaokereke
There might be CompSci-program ethics courses that, in this day and age, have at least basic self-awareness. Probably not, but let's hope!
Even so, if the legal/political arena is corrupt, it matters not what technology workers think.
@mekkaokereke I mean, I taught a CS ethics class the quarter after I defended my thesis. I don’t think I did a spectacular job of that one, but it turns out there are always a lot of recent examples to discuss…
@mekkaokereke I think the amount of prestige now associated with entering the technology industry makes a fix basically impossible. Prestige mongers going to do as they do, they always wind up doing something, whether it was finance, medicine, law, management consulting…and now technology.
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