"I bemoaned that humanity seems to be serving technology rather than the other way around. I argued that tech corporations have become too powerful and their power must be curtailed."
That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech".
It shows up in "tech" because "tech" scales so well and has such strong network effects. But the US's tolerance of monopoly is the real cause. There need to be about four major players before markets push prices down. The US has three big banks, two big drugstore chains, etc.
Tough antitrust enforcement would help. Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other.
Tough labor law enforcement would help. No more "gig worker" jobs that are exempt from labor law.
No more "wage shaving". No more unpaid overtime. Prorate medical insurance payments based on hours, so companies that won't pay people for more than 30 hours a week pay their fraction of medical insurance.
A minimum wage high enough that people making it don't need food stamps.
> Prorate medical insurance payments based on hours, so companies that won't pay people for more than 30 hours a week pay their fraction of medical insurance
Attaching medical insurance to one's job is a market distortion caused by government tax policy. I.e. it enables one to buy insurance with pre-tax dollars rather than after-tax dollars. Making medical insurance premiums fully tax-deductible would fix that.
> A minimum wage high enough that people making it don't need food stamps.
That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more. Nobody is going to hire people who cost more than the value they produce.
> Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other.
Google is already in trouble because AI is disrupting their search/advertisement business model.
I'd be careful about destroying big business. The US is only part of the world. Destroying US big business means other countries will have those companies, and it's lose lose for the US. Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
> Attaching medical insurance to one's job is a market distortion caused by government tax policy
Here in the US, FDR had a wage freeze as part of his policies [1] to deal with the continuing Great Depression that WWII had not stopped yet by 1942. Because of that, companies needed to get inventive about ways to increase benefits but not illegally increase wages. Companies started offering insurance plans.
That's where the employment/insurance coupling started.
It’s not that simple. Pretax premiums could be wiped out with the stroke of a pen.
I worked at an entity with 300+ thousand employees and Probably another 200k retirees… I was able to pay full cost to retain my health insurance from them.
The benefits and out of pocket costs are incredible - my current CEO asked me why I do that rather that use the company insurance and I walked through it with him. It’s not possible to buy that coverage, between the legacy insurance plan and huge risk pool, only the largest entities can have the best insurance.
The “simple answer” is pretty easy. Put a 10% payroll tax with a $5M income cap, and build out Medicare with whatever benefits are doable under that cost structure. Let the market compete for extended benefits, which would work like a traditional insurance market.
The doctors and medical industries would be happy. People would gain newfound job mobility and freedom. Most people would save money vs the payments they make today. Rich people would be sad because taxes.
> Attaching medical insurance to one's job is a market distortion caused by government tax policy. I.e. it enables one to buy insurance with pre-tax dollars rather than after-tax dollars.
Also the ACA Employer Mandate[1]. Get rid of that and maybe figure out some sort of "nutrition label" style thing to make it easier to compare offers that are more cash vs more benefits.
First, private insurance shouldn't exist at all. It is rent-seeking of the highest order. There's no need for it. The US is the only country that works this way.
But let's put that aside. What we have now isn't amarket distortion caused by using pre-tax dollars for employer insurance. It's that an employer can collectively bargain for insurance in a way that an individual never can.
If you have 100,000 people in a group then statistical norms come into play of how often you'll need to do a transplant or [insert expensive procedure here]. Plus you have the negotiating power to get better coverage at a lower price than an individual ever can.
So individual insurance can never work regardless of tax policy. Tying insurance to employment is bad for pretty obvious reasons. And this is how we return to "private insurance shouldn't exist".
> That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more.
This doesn't actually bear out. Minimum wage increases really don't have a history of making minimum wage employees unemployable, or destroying the companies affected. In fact, the opposite tends to happen, as these businesses tend to be frequented by other minimum wage employees as customers, so it ends up being a rising tide that lifts all boats.
> Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
I'd argue that you can't just airdrop these companies into another country and have them be as successful as they are. Even with much stricter monopoly laws, there is a LOT about America that incentivizes these companies to locate there, and frankly I'm not convinced they'd move.
And as a Canadian, I don't even want Big Tech to be American. =) The US is only part of the world, as you said, but your lax and corrupt legal system is polluting the world with these dangerous megacorps.
Don't get me wrong, we're none better, our system would allow for nearly the same abuse, were it not for the fact that our whole country is smaller in population that California. But the point remains that there's a lot of the world that is looking on in horror at these rampaging monster companies and is not in any way assured by the "at least they're American" defense.
Or, put differently, it makes the profits of the companies who hire them unsustainable. IMO allowing an non-livable wage in order to subsidize profits isn't a great policy.
Americans will consider anything other than a proper public health system. Like a hare-brained scheme of pro rating insurance premiums to hours worked, whatever the fuck that means. Or making insurance premiums tax deductible. Just utter stupidity at every turn.
> That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more. Nobody is going to hire people who cost more than the value they produce.
Good, a job that cannot support biological needs should not exist. It’s not a viable business.
Why should I pay a stealth subsidy to whatever business it is.
> Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
This excuse was used to start wars, trample civil rights and employment rights. It basically means we must become like China to beat China. What would be the point?
Is there some evidence that big american companies are less negative than big [insert adversary of the decade] are?
Companies are not bound by morals, national identity, or any interest other than self-perpetuation. They are a virus that we harness to do good. When the virus overwhelms its host, its time for medicine.
> That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more. Nobody is going to hire people who cost more than the value they produce.
You're subsidizing those wages with your tax dollars. You're paying billions per year to make those low incomes livable. In the end it's just corporate welfare:
I think an under-discussed issue is how companies are allowed to own sub-companies that don't need to necessarily disclose they're owned by a larger conglomerate. Like I don't know how you necessarily solve this, but I think if people, for example, knew the sheer number of snack brands owned by Nabisco, there would be a lot more discussion about corporate consolidation and monopolies.
> That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech".
There is a general problem with corporatism and monopoly, but there are also specific problems with "tech". Oil & gas monopolies don't broadly carry everyone's private interactions. Sports monopolies generally can't expose political dissidents.
>Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other.
I admire the general spirit of your comment, but this specific example seems off to me. Search and browsers, for example, don't make sense as independent businesses. Rather, they are products based off of Ads.
Maybe the idea would be for Ads to pay Search to include their ads, and for Search to pay Browsers to be the default search engine?
Apple should also be broken up into hardware/os, app store, services, payments, media
Your car shouldn't decide who you can do business with nor should it get a fee from every store you drive to. It shouldn't push it's own payment system for all purchases. And neither should a pocket computer do these things
Antitrust enforcement is so hit-or-miss, contingent upon risky prosecution in court and a DOJ willing to undertake it, and with no ability to scale. It has made me wonder whether a statutory approach may be better, where companies past a certain [relative] size threshold would need to split up. Then it would be no surprise to shareholders and consumers wouldn’t need to be harmed for years before maybe regulators would dare step in. I think it would do a lot for the US competitively, too, to ensure the market remains dynamic. Sustained vigorous competition seems likelier to serve us better in the long run than boosterism of our largest companies.
Yes and: aka Preferential attachment leading to winner-takes-all.
It's just math. Not some kind of weird moralistic blather.
The tendency towards concentration necessitates some counter balance, backpressure, redistribution, whatever.
> need to be about four major players before markets push prices down.
Yes and: I believe, but cannot prove, unifying markets (nationalization, globalization) accelerated monopolization.
Alas, I don't have any ideas on how to put the toothpaste back into the tube. Clearly, we're not reverting to regionalism or localism any time soon. Economically or politically.
> "I bemoaned that humanity seems to be serving technology rather than the other
> way around. I argued that tech corporations have become too powerful and their
> power must be curtailed."
> That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech".
If you wound enjoy a deep and rigorous treatment of this subject, I strongly recommend Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology."
He argues that modern technology is fundamentally different from historical technology, and that corporatism and monopoly are the inevitable result of technology.
The US cellular market has T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T and a bunch of mvnos. Dish is starting out and a few years back we had Sprint before it merged with TMobile.
I wouldn’t say the competitiveness changed all that much and I would say it’s more competitive than Canada with also 3 and less competitive than France with 4. However the competitiveness in France now is specifically because a low cost provider Free entered and started stealing all the costumers rather than because of the number of competitors.
I disagree. It's a problem with tech because even if regulations exist, new tech moves much faster than regulation. And technology is too seductive to be used properly so people indeed end up serving tech just as drug addicts live for their habit. Many more details are explained in "The Metaphysics of Technology" by David Skrbina or "The Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul.
Technology has a tendency to overwhelm and transform everything for the sake of technology.
It is an even more generic problem than that since it also applies to bureaucracy and by extension the government.
While I agree with you on the basic issue of monopolies, I think the biggest monopoly problem is the U.S. government. It's so massive that it absolutely dwarfs all other monopolies, like Google.
I would therefore like a solution that does not, in any way whatsoever, increase the power of the US government.
Empires tend to have defining characteristics that are both the reason they become empires in the first place and ultimately what is their undoing.
The British Empire was the drug dealer empire (first tobacco then opium).
The US is the arms dealer empire, at least since WWI.
The point here is that I believe that any sufficiently large company in the US eventually becomes a defense contractor and thus aligns itself with US foreign policy [1].
So we have Amazon selling cloud services to the CIA, Google selling cloud services to the military and Israel, Meta cooperating with military uses of AI and so on.
And we need Glass-Stegall back. Banks and brokerages should be separate. There is no good reason that Goldman Sachs should be a bank, other than for bailouts,
which is why they became a bank.
The US also has a relatively huge amount of small banks that are specialized in financing niches. It’s actually a huge competitive advantage. If I want a bank that specializes in loans for PNW fishing boats, that exists, and they are able to competitively price a loan that BoA won’t even consider.
The flip side is that big banks are great at driving down costs for standard operations (when there are enough of them to be competitive). If all I need is a business checking account as a consultant, I can access that for no cost via one of the giants.
This is a Gish Gallop of completely unrelated things.
Tech companies can become very powerful without holding a monopoly. All it takes is being big enough to have political sway either through being a big employer or just by straight up lobbying.
The US has a few big banks and then hundreds of regional banks. It’s trivial to bank without using the big ones.
Prohibiting a post breakup Google from contracting with each other is completely idiotic. Either they make sense as standalone businesses or they don’t. Why wouldn’t Google search be allowed to use GCP but be allows to use AWS? If they are different companies they will use what is best for the company and regulating that they use something worse is bad for everyone.
The hyperfocus on shareholder returns is also worth mentioning. It's tangentially related to a monopolistic trajectory. Instead of a company being really good at solving problems in a particular domain they attempt to serve many mediocre solutions in a variety of domains. Shareholders, VCs, and the like encourage this lack of focus on quality and replace it with a focus on margins. The solution for low margins is lower head count and greater diversification of SKUs. For many companies, it's a recipe for enshittification and spirals into mediocrity. Not to mention, when a company enters this phase the lives of employees begin to suffer greatly.
> All of us must navigate the trade-off between “me” and “we.” A famous Talmudic quote states: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?” We must balance optimizing for oneself with optimizing for others, including the public good... To take an extreme example, Big Tobacco surely does not support the public good, and most of us would agree that it is unethical to work for Big Tobacco. The question, thus, is whether Big Tech is supporting the public good, and if not, what should Big Tech workers do about it.
The duty to align your professional life ethically scales with your ability to do so. I personally don't cast aspersions on anyone working in tobacco farms or in a gas station selling cigarettes; they're just trying to get by. But if you're one or two levels up Maslow's Pyramid, it's right to weigh your personal needs against the impact of your work. You'll also be better off for it, knowing that the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.
I'll also say: there are ways to contribute morally outside of your 9-5. Volunteer to teach a neighborhood kid to code. Show your local sandwich shop how to set their hours online, or maybe even build them a cookie cutter Squarespace site. Donate a small fraction of your salary (eg 0.5% local, 0.5% global) to causes you believe in, and scale up over the years.
I worked for almost 27 years, for a company that aligned with my personal morals. The pay was substantially less than what I could have made at less-circumspect outfits, and there was a nonzero amount of really annoying overhead, but I don't regret it, at all. I slept well at night, made good friends, never wrote any software that I regretted, learned heaps of stuff, and helped to develop and launch the careers of a few others.
Sounds great. Don't listen to the pseudo-realists who chase dreams of grandeur rather than doing something (at least semi-) useful or good with their lives.
Almost same here, but I also understand that it's a luxury. At this point in my life I can afford it, but I've also seen times when I could do anything to get food on table for my family. Luckily for me those times didn't last.
My opinion after reading HN for quite a while is that your average HN poster is well educated and knows a lot of theory but struggles with ethics. Perhaps even seeing a debate against ethics as a game to be won.
I don't think people are scornful of your work. It makes me happy to hear that people still find meaningful employment within their means of living. It's increasingly rare that someone is paid to do something impactful these days. You should feel happy.
The part that will attract scorn is pretending that everyone can do that. In the same way that religion spread by preying on the poor and lecherous portions of society, so too does the tech industry offer the downtrodden and mistreated a better life in exchange for moral leniency. It's not even the "revenge of the nerd" stuff past a certain point - if a $60,000/year software engineer in America turns up their nose to a contract, you can simply send it to a development firm in Pakistan for pennies on the dollar and get roughly equivalent results. There is no moral bartering with at-will employment. It's an illusion.
As individuals, you and I are both powerless to stop the proliferation and success of harmful businesses. America's number one lesson from the past 4 centuries of economic planning is that laissez-faire policy does not course-correct without government intervention. Collective bargaining only works when you're bargaining on a market you control - boycotting certain employers is entirely ineffective when you compare it to legislative reform.
So, with that being said, saving your dignity is not enough to save society. You have every right to take comfort in working a job that you respected - but nobody here owes you any more respect than their dairy farmers or the guy in Thailand that made their $55 Izod sweatshirt. If you come around expecting the hero treatment, then you're bound to feel shortchanged. Sorry.
> The duty to align your professional life ethically scales with your ability to do so.
I think this implies that we all should aim to have for everybody those abilities. That is, if somebody is unable, in this sense, to be ethical because he's just trying to get by, it's actually our problem - e.g. he sells cigarettes and that harms us. So we need to some extent work on the goal of everybody having abilities to live ethically.
There's a lot of beneficial things that might happen if we, as a society, worked at helping the Invisible Hand manifest. Especially if we also ceased putting so much effort into fighting it.
One of the basic tenets of capitalism is that the exchanges are all voluntary. In practice they are quite clearly not.
Most people want to judge others and rationalize their own behavior, while piling on to whatever views happen to be popular at the time.
What's worse, working for Big Tobacco, or working for Big Tech, or working for the DEA and spending your days forcefully "civil forfeituring" innocent people's money without charges? The former are at least taking money from people who voluntarily surrender it in exchange for some service, with fairly good knowledge of what they're getting themselves into. While the latter are basically highway robbers. Yet society has chosen to popularize the first one as immoral, and is now working on villifying the second, with only scant mention of the third.
I'm sure I'm guilty of selective outrage myself. If we're going to quote religious references, how about Christ admonishing those who point out the spec in their neighbor's eye, while ignoring the log in their own.
More focus on one's own morality, and less on judging others, just might make the world a slightly better place.
Highly highly disagree. It seems to me the opposite!
People (incl. here) want to rationalise their behaviour by giving excuses — such as the very popular "but X is even worse and people don't complain about it" that you yourself are doing — for the fact that they work on in-ethical stuff, because the honest answer is simply "this pays cartloads of money, fuck you got mine", which is unpalatable to their own self-perception.
It's at least plausible that someone at the DEA genuinely wants to make a nicer, safer world for themselves and their neighbors. Yes, the agency does the terrible things you mention, but it also gets some horrific stuff off the streets. (Think fentanyl and meth, not weed. I couldn't care less about that.)
No one working for Big Tobacco thinks they're making the world better unless they're an idiot.
I made the choice to change my occupation for a more moral one. One issue is, you lose a lot of social credit doing so. It’s seen as a personal failure rather than a choice. It might also be that implicitly challenging their choices makes people uncomfortable.
How do you meet people who take responsibility for their life design?
My counter argument is that the US is already the most charitable country in the world in terms of private contributions, yet there are maybe 10-20 countries where the common people are better off than we are (note the large error bar there). I speculate that private charity versus private anti-charity is like bringing a knife to a gun fight.
> there are ways to contribute morally outside of your 9-5. Volunteer to teach a neighborhood kid to code.
This simplistic view of the world does not scale -- especially so in today's global economy. Imagine we never had public education and instead relied on the good nature of individuals to teach their neighborhood kids. Imagine competing at a global level without a coordinated educational system with baseline standards. Instead, what we need is to teach every kid how to code (many may not end up coding as a profession, but that's fine; every kid that has the affinity and talent and and wants to do it should have the chance).
That's nominally why we have government of the people, by the people, for the people. That's why we have taxes. These scale when the interests are aligned. We've seen them scale.
The problem arises when (as Mitt Romney famously expressed) we think of corporations as people, too, and assign them rights associated with personhood.
They are of "some" people, by "some" people, for "some" people.
This is the crisis I think the US is having now. This is what it think was punctuated with COVID; there is no longer the spirit of "we" and the US is in the era of "me".
Yes. However, just like someone considering dinner might falsely convince themselves 'I will eat this broccoli and this cheesecake and it will balance out to mostly healthy,' teaching some neighborhood kids to code won't ethically offset evil professional work, nor will donating a trivial fraction of your share of the ill-gotten proceeds.
> knowing that the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.
I don't understand what you're weighing this against? A job that is literally saving lives maybe, or really leading in a field of science or technology?
Most of us don't have that though, even here on hacker news. Most of us are part of a larger effort that will progress just as well without us, our personal impact is marginal at best.
I've worked in tech for two decades for a company I deem "moral" and I feel I've had impact. But I could have fitted kitchens or made wedding cakes for that time and had just as positive an impact on the world and people I serve professionally. Hell, if I was a carpenter my work could probably outlast anything I've done in tech.
That last part makes me a bit nervous. It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.
I don't think that's the point you're making, but it's good to be careful with that. You can do good after hours, but it doesn't absolve you from what you're doing 9-to-5.
As to your first point: yes, but it's all relative. Most tech workers are "trying to get by" in their minds. Just look at the SFBA rents and the PG&E bills! And wait until you hear about their college loans... most people in the top 1% don't think about themselves as the top 1%.
In the end, making good decisions often requires sacrifice, pretty much no matter how much you make. And we often find ways to rationalize why it's not the right time for that.
What confuses me is how many people are evidently in the job of "ruthless exec" and then they do it amorally. I can't think of any time in my life that I've seen an exec say: no, we could do that, but we shouldn't because it's wrong. No doubt because anyone who acts that way gets naturally-selected out of the job.
But also there seems to be a pervasive belief, which if anything feels way strong than it was when I was younger (maybe because the moral-majority christian-nation vibes have fully disappeared, in the US at least? sure, it was always fairly hollow, but at least it was a thing at all), that a business leader is not supposed to do moral things, because it's not their job description; their job truly is "increase shareholder value on a 6-12 month timescale", and if they try to do something different they are judged negatively!
So maybe there is in theory good to be done by being an exec and being more moral than average (maybe not a tobacco exec, but, say, in tech?). But the system is basically designed to prevent you from doing it? It almost seems as though modern model of shareholder capitalism is almost designed to keep things this way: to eliminate the idea at any point that a person should feel bad if they just do the "efficient", shareholder-value-maximizing thing. Nobody has any agency in the big machine, which means no one is accountable for what it does. Perfect, just how we like it? Whereas at least a private enterprise which is beholden to the principles of its leader could in principle do something besides the most cynical possible play at every turn.
> It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.
> But if you're one or two levels up Maslow's Pyramid, it's right to weigh your personal needs against the impact of your work. You'll also be better off for it, knowing that <b>the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears</b> and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.
To highlight this part of the original in support of this comment. This comes of as somewhat arrogant and is a pretty big red flag...
>It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.
You're saying this as if it's a given, but why wouldn't this work?
But if you won’t be the big tabacco exec, someone else will.
So I actually agree with the notion that being the big tabacco exec and doing good things with your money, plus helping steer things from the inside is a better proposition than becoming a baker and letting someone who has NO moral qualms with tabacco run the ship.
It’s rarely as effective to push change from the outside as it is the inside.
> The duty to align your professional life ethically scales with your ability to do so.
Humans respond to incentives. We seek rewards that may be monetary, social, or intellectual: we optimize our behavior for them all the same. Trying to improve the world by scolding people for acting according to their incentives will not work. It's not a serious position. "If everyone would just..." --- no, everyone is not going to just, and if they were, they'd have already done it. Your exhortation will make no difference.
If you want to change the world, change the incentive structure. Don't expect people to act against their personal interests because you say so. At best, they'll ignore you. At worst, they'll maliciously comply and cause even more harm.
One’s conscience is part of one’s incentives. And talking to people can actually affect their conscience. Public discourse like the one taking place here is part of the factors that can cause cultural shifts.
I think Moshe is right but chose a really poor analogy in Big Tobacco, I want to say because working in tech is not at all like a farmer working laboriously in a physical field which is a lot less ideological and more driven by being in a poor 3rd world country, etc.
"And while you were paying attention to these things, you were momentarily delivered from daydreams, from memories, from anticipations, from silly notions - from all the symptoms of you."
"Isn't tasting me?"
...
"I'd say it was halfway between me and not-me. Tasting is not-me doing something for the whole organism.
And at the same time tasting is me being conscious of what's happening. And that's the point of our chewing-grace - to make the me more conscious of what the not-me is up to."
Morality is completely subjective. Prior to certain events in the last year I would’ve said that there were some objective standards like minimizing harm to children, but that’s out the window now, with most of Big Tech implicated.
As a moderately less contentious example, Alex Karp argues fervently that it is immoral to not produce weapons of war for western countries and the U.S. in particular. Many people agree with him. Ultimately people justify their method of making a living in whichever way they choose, and tech workers are no different. History is the log of the winners and losers of the war between the adherents of different moral codes.
> "It is immoral to not produce weapons of war for western countries and the US in particular"
I cannot imagine that a substantial "many" people believe this. How does it work exactly? If you have any expertise even adjacent to weapons building (e.g. being a programmer) and you are not building weapons for the US due to a lack of effort (as opposed to failing the interview) you're doing something immoral?
I don't think many would agree with this. I suppose his stance is somehow more nuanced? (I wouldn't agree with it either, but at least it would be slightly more reasonable).
>Prior to certain events in the last year I would’ve said that there were some objective standards like minimizing harm to children, but that’s out the window now, with most of Big Tech implicated.
You're saying as if it's indisputable that "Big Tech" was harming children, but we're nowhere close to that. At best, the current literature shows a very weak negative correlational relationship between social media use and mental health. That's certainly not enough to lambast "Big Tech" for failing to abide by "objective standards like minimizing harm to children".
Moreover I question whether "objective standards like minimizing harm to children" existed to begin with, or we're just looking at the past with rose tinted glasses. During the industrial revolution kids worked in factories and mines. In the 20th century they were exposed to lead and particulate pollution. Even if you grant that "Big Tech" was harming kids in some way, I doubt they're doing it in some unprecedented way like you implied.
Our intelligence agencies have long recognized that individuals burdened by debt are vulnerable to coercion and manipulation. It's time we acknowledge that the H1-B visa program creates a similar dynamic. The program’s restrictive rules effectively hang over visa holders like the sword of Damocles, leaving them perpetually at risk and easily controlled.
We’ve already seen how Twitter, under Musk’s leadership, has exploited this system to erode user protections in favor of appeasing his ego. When such moral compromises are normalized at the top, their effects inevitably cascade downward, influencing broader organizational norms and behaviors.
Around the time I was born, my dad was in the army and was taught in an intelligence class that "financial problems" is one of the most exploitable facets of a person by nation states. I don't really know much about his work, but it sounded like his role was particularly at-risk from nation states trying to pull information from him.
What's interesting though is that around that time we basically had no money and support from the military! We lived in a roach-infested home and barely had money for groceries! It absolutely blows me away that my family could barely support itself considering the known-and-taught risks of such a situation.
When he told me about that I asked him why they didn't pay the family more, considering the risks. He hadn't considered it even once before that conversation.
> It's time we acknowledge that the H1-B visa program creates a similar dynamic. The program’s restrictive rules effectively hang over visa holders like the sword of Damocles, leaving them perpetually at risk and easily controlled.
This is why I went through the pain and cost of sponsoring my own O1 and later EB instead of relying on an employer or spousal visa. You just cannot be a full participant with someone who can get you kicked out of the country on 10 day notice.
> leaving them perpetually at risk and easily controlled.
I'd use a stronger term here, for some more nefarious companies can both exploit and abuse employees on a H1b visa limitation. Now go work 60 hour weeks for less than your peers!!
> It's time we acknowledge that the H1-B visa program creates a similar dynamic....leaving them perpetually at risk and easily controlled.
By associating this to the subject of the post, are you implying that the perpetrators of unethical tech in the U.S. are mainly foreign workers, and not "homegrown" citizens?
No, to interpret it in a way that suggests that's it's mainly foreign workers would be extrapolating beyond what I said. I believe the worker-employee dynamic is fundamentally unbalanced[1] in favor of employer leverage over employees. I simply believe that this same dynamic is exaggerated when it comes to H1-B workers. It's simply easier to examine a social relation when it's more apparent.
1. Workers' choice of employment does not come close to ameliorating the disadvantage. Every argument against this is a coping mechanism.
I would like to see two changes. One, better oversight of the job categories and their prevailing wage (no more creating new categories with low wages). Two, more freedom for the immigrant to switch jobs at will so long as their job family doesn’t change.
These changes are pro-worker (both resident and immigrant) because they remove the main benefits of hiring foreign labor and prevent undercutting wages. They are changes that I believe SWEs as a class should be in favor of.
What is the relationship between this blog post and the H1-B visa program? And are you saying that Twitter has exploited the H-1B program to erode user protections?
It seems like you're just trying to shoehorn some kind of unrelated anti-Musk sentiment into a discussion that has nothing to do with H-1B visas or Elon Musk?
No, they (and every other BigTech) exploit it to erode worker protections.
Which in turn contributes to eroding user protections, since unprotected workers aren't really in a position to put up a fight when management tells them to do something unethical.
Couldn't disagree more about Elon. I'm just glad there was someone able to open up free speech again on a social media platform and reveal for all to see the level of censorship (by surrogacy) by the govt.I think we might be in a very dark place indeed if this level of govt corruption was allowed to persist for even a few more years.
What a terribly unfortunate time for you to foolishly choose to die on that particular of hill trying to defend Elon Musk's dedication to free speech. It says as much about your lack of situational awareness and tenuous grasp of reality and current events, as it does about Elon Musk's thin skinned hypocrisy and contempt for the free speech of anyone but himself.
>Elon Musk accused of censoring conservatives on X who disagree with him about immigration.
The claims came after Elon Musk was involved in a public feud with some Republicans over immigration.
There is still censorship by surrogacy. It’s just that now they censor things you don’t like being said, so you don’t mind as much. For you it’s not a problem as long as the people being censored have a world view or narrative contrary to your own. But that’s not the same as being a free speech supporter.
That’s being a supporter of free speech for you. Not for anyone else.
I worked in Big Tech and it changed my life financially so I can’t judge anyone else for doing it, but I will say that I had a moral reckoning while I was there and I am (right now) unwilling to go back.
At the time (2012-2022) the things about the business model that bothered me were surveillance culture, excessive advertising, and monopoly power. Internally I was also horrified at the abuse of “vendor/contractor” status to maintain a shadow workforce which did a lot of valuable work while receiving almost none of the financial benefits that the full-time workforce received.
3 years later all of those concerns remain but for me they’re a distant second behind the rise of AI. There’s a non-zero chance that AI is one of the most destructive creations in human history and I just can’t allow myself to help advance it until I’m convinced that chance is much closer to zero. I’m in the minority I know, so the best case scenario for me is that I’m wrong and everyone getting rich on AI right now has gotten rich for bringing us something good, not our doom.
I’m curious as to how you think it’ll be our doom. As for the ethics in it, there are two ways to look at it in my opinion. One is yours, the other is to accept that AI is coming and at least work to help your civilisation “win”. I doubt we’ll see any form of self aware AI in our lifetimes, but the AI tools are obviously going to become extremely powerful tool. I suspect we’ll continue heading down the “cyberpunk” road leading to the dystopian society we read about in the 80/90ies, but that’s not really the doom of mankind as such. It just sucks.
As a former history major I do think it’ll be interesting to follow how AI shifts the power balances. We like to pretend that we’ve left the “might makes right” world behind, but AI is an arms race, and it’ll make some terrible weapons. Ethics aside you’re going to want to have the best of those if you want your civilisation to continue being capable or deciding which morals it wants to follow.
I don't think most are primarily concerned about war applications, but simply driving mass unemployment.
This even seems to be the exact goal of many who then probably imagine the next step would then be some sort of basic income to keep things moving, but the endless side effects of this transition make it very unclear if this is even economically feasible.
At best, it would seem to be a return to defacto feudalism. I think 'The Expanse' offered a quite compelling vision of what "Basic" would end up being like in practice.
Those who are seen (even if through no fault of their own) as providing no value to society - existing only to consume, will inevitably be marginalized and ultimately seen as something less than.
1) Self aware AI with its own agency / free will / goals. This is much harder to predict and is IMO less likely with the current approaches so i'll skip it.
2) A"I" / ML tools will become a force multiplier and the powerful will be even more so. Powerful people and organizations (including governments) already have access to much more data about individuals than ordinary citizens. But currently you usually need loyal people to sift through data and to act on it.
With advanced ML tools, you can analyze every person's entire personality, beliefs, social status, etc. And if they align with your goals, you can promote them, if not, you can disadvantage them.
2a) This works if you're a rich person deciding whose medical bills you will pay (and one such person was recently killed for abusing this power).
2b) This works if you're a rich person owning a social network by deciding who's opinions will be more or less visible to others. You can shape entire public discourse and make entire opinions and topics invisible to those who have not already been exposed to them. For example one such censored topic in western discourse is when the use of violence is justified and moral. The west, at least for now, is willing to celebrate moral acts of violence in the past (French revolution, American civil war, assassination of Reinhard Heydrich) but discussion of situations where violence should be used in recent times is taboo and "banned" on many centrally moderated platforms.
2c) And obviously nation states have insane amount of info on both their own citizens and those from other nation states. They already leads to selective enforcement (everybody is guilty of something) and it can get even worse when the government becomes more totalitarian. Can you imagine current China ever having a revolution and reinstating democracy? I can't because any dissent will be stopped before it reaches critical mass.
So states which are currently totalitarian are very unlikely to restore democracy and states which are currently democracies are prone to increasingly totalitarian rule by manipulation from rich individuals - see point 2b.
I think the AI investor class wants to find a way to have it replace a large amount of human labor. I think if they succeed this will damage our society irreparably which, like it or not, only works well when people have jobs.
I’m also very worried about AI spam and impersonation eroding all interpersonal trust online which has obvious disastrous consequences.
While unemployment certainly deserves a conversation of its own, I think the more overlooked aspects of education and democracy will erode our society deeper into a hole by themselves.
I'm rather fearful for the future of education in this current climate. The tools are already powerful enough to wreak havoc and they haven't stopped growing yet! I don't think we'll properly know the effect for some years now, not until the kids that are currently in 5th, 6th, or 7th start going into the workforce. While the individual optimist in me would like to see AI as this great equalizer, personal tutor for everyone, equal opportunity deliverance, I think we've fumbled it for all but a select few. Certainly there will be cases of great success, students who leverage AI to it's fullest extent. But I urge one to think of the other side of the pie. How will that student respond to this? And how many students are really in this section?
AI in its current state presents a pact with the devil for all but the most disciplined and passionate of us. It makes it far to easy to resign all use of your critical mental faculties, and to stagnate in your various abilities to navigate our complex modern world. Skills such as critical reading, synthesizing, and writing are just a few of the most notable examples. Unrestrained use of tools that help us so immensely in these categories can bring nothing but slow demise for us in the end.
This thought pattern pairs nicely with the discussion of AIs effects on democracy. Hopefully the step taken from assuming the aforementioned society, with its rampant inabilities to reason critically about its surroundings, to saying that this is categorically bad for democracy, isn't too large. Democracy, an imperfect form of government that is the best we have at this moment, only works well with an educated populace. An uneducated democracy governs on borrowed time. One can already see the paint start to peel (there is a larger effect that the Internet has on democracy that I'll leave out of this for now, but is worth thinking about as it's the one responsible for the current decline in our political reality).
The unfortunate conclusion that I reach when I think of all of this, is that it comes down to the ability of government and corporations to properly restrain this technology and foster its growth in a manner that is beneficial for society. And that restraint is hard to see coming with our current set up. This is to avoid being overly dramatic and saying that it's impossible.
If you look at the history of the United States, and truly observe the death grip that its baby, capitalism, has on its governance, if you look at this, you find it hard to believe that this time will be any different from times past. There is far too much money and national security concern at stake here to do anything but put the pedal to the floor and rapidly build an empire in this wild west of AI. The unfortunate conclusion is that perhaps this could have been a wonderful tool for humanity, and allowed us to realize our collective dreams, but due to the reasons stated above I believe this is unachievable with our current set up of governance and understanding of ethics, globally.
> There’s a non-zero chance that AI is one of the most destructive creations in human history
Geoffrey Hinton was interviewed by Sajid Javid on BBC R4 on Friday [1] and was considerable more pessimistic. If I hear it correctly he reckoned that there is a 10% to 30% chance that AI wipes us out within the next 30 years.
I specifically said I don’t judge others for working there now and just wanted to add to the conversation by explaining how my thoughts changed over time. I do not think I was or am brave for any of my career decisions.
I was 20 when I started working in big tech and the reputation of those companies was at its absolute peak. I had a lot to learn.
> But I have yet, until now, to point at the elephant in the room and ask whether it is ethical to work for Big Tech, taking all of the above into consideration.
People often highlight "boycotting" as the most effective action an individual can take to drive change, but for those who work in tech, the most powerful message you can send is denying your labor.
To me, this isn’t even about whether "Big Tech" companies are ethical; it’s a matter of ideological principle. FAANG companies already wield far too much power, and I refuse to contribute to that imbalance.
that's still boycotting. but it needs to be active rather than passive to send a message. not applying for work is not enough, you have to decline at offer stage on stated principles. i dont think most would go through that effort.
only the highest level individuals who Big Tech tries to poach can do this without much time invesment because they effectively have offers at first contact.
I don't think anyone is obligated to go through the entire interview process just so they can decline the offer.
Yes, you'd waste a few hours of some expensive engineers' time, and more hours of relatively cheap recruiter time - but sending the recruiter a big ol' fuck you on first contact gets the message across just fine.
I don't think any of these things ultimately work. There will always be someone who will take the money or the deal. Advocating for regulation is the most effective way forward. But probably the first thing to advocate for is some notion of "equal speech," not just "free speech," otherwise it will be very hard to get any new regulation passed.
By equal speech I mean that people should have equal opportunity to be heard and pitch ideas when it comes to political advocacy. If the rich can send a million messages for every one of yours, no one will ever hear or listen to you.
I would consider that unethical, and would not do it.
For many reasons, I live a life of extremely rigorous personal ethics.
I don’t insist that others do the same, but I do need to protect myself from others that assume my ethical stance to be weakness.
For example; I make it a point to always keep my word.
Unethical folks that know this of me, are constantly trying to get me to make commitments, without divulging the costs to me, or the boundaries of said commitments.
It’s my responsibility to make sure that I have full disclosure, before making a commitment.
Many people become quite jaded and misanthropic, when faced with this. I tend to find it amusing, watching people try weaseling out of giving full information. Often, these efforts tell me more about things, than full disclosure up front will.
I like people, and can call some really rapacious bastards friend. My ethical stance is truly entirely personal, and I have worked closely, with some spectacularly flawed people.
Scott Adams (He Whose Name Has Been Struck From The Lists) wrote an extremely cynical book, called The Way of the Weasel, which is downright prescient.
Not only do I disagree with the premise, but I think the article is poorly argued.
Was working on the Manhattan project unethical because it furnished the ability for us to kill humans on an even more vast industrial scale than we previously could have imagined? Perhaps, but it's hard to square this with the reality that the capability of mutually assured destruction has ushered in the longest period of relative peace and global stability in recorded history, during a period of time we might otherwise expect dramatically increased conflict and strife (because we are sharing our limited planet with an additional order of magnitude of humans). Had everyone at Los Alamos boycotted the effort, would we be in a better place when some other power inevitably invented the atomic bomb? Somehow I doubt it.
The world is a complex system. While there are hopefully an expanding set of core "values" that we collectively believe in, any single person is going to be challenged by conflicting values at times. This is like the Kagan stages of psychological development [1], but societally. I can believe that it's net bad for society that someone is working on a cigarette manufacturing line, without personally holding them accountable for the ills that are downstream of their work. There are competing systems (family, society) that place competing values (good - we can afford to live, bad - other people get sick and die) on the exact same work.
If people want to boycott some types of work, more power to them, but I don't think the line between "ethical" and "unethical" tasks is so clear that you can put whole corporations on one side or another of that line.
Sometimes I try and put a dollar amount on how much value I have received from Google in my lifetime. I've used their products for at least 20 years. Tens of thousands of dollars seems like an accurate estimate. I'm happy to recognize that two things are true: that there are societal problems with some big tech businesses that we would collectively benefit from solving AND that I (and millions of other people less fortunate than me, that couldn't "afford" the non-ad-supported cost of these services) have benefited tremendously from the existence of Google and its ilk.
> Was working on the Manhattan project unethical because it furnished the ability for us to kill humans on an even more vast industrial scale than we previously could have imagined? Perhaps, but it's hard to square this with the reality that the capability of mutually assured destruction has ushered in the longest period of relative peace and global stability in recorded history
Ah, consequentialist versus deontological ethics: neither camp can even hear the other. Some people just pattern-match making thing X (weapons, profits, patents, non-free software, whatever) against individual behavior and condemn individuals doing these things regardless of the actual effects on the real world. Sure, invading Japan instead of bombing it would have killed a million Americans and who knows how many Japanese (real WW2 allied estimate), but ATOM BOMB BAD and PEOPLE WHO DO BAD, and so we get people who treat Los Alamos as some kind of moral black hole.
The world makes sense only when we judge actions by their consequences. The strident and brittle deontological rules that writers of articles that feature the wor d"ethics" in the headline invariably promote are poor approximations of the behaviors that lead to good consequences in the world.
> invading Japan instead of bombing it would have killed a million Americans and who knows how many Japanese (real WW2 allied estimate),
Most people who believe that nuclear strikes on Japan were morally wrong also believe that Japan would have surrendered regardless, and nukes were thus redundant (and hence, wrong).
If you studied this question, you should know that there's a compelling argument that Japanese were motivated just as much if not more by Soviets entering the fray with considerable success. Now, you may personally disagree with this assessment, but surely you can at least recognize that others can legitimately hold this opinion and base their ethical calculus on it?
> The world makes sense only when we judge actions by their consequences.
I'm not sure I agree with this part. To quote Gene Wolfe: "until we reach the end of time we don’t know whether something is good or bad, we can only judge the intentions of those who acted." Judging morals by outcome seems like a tricky path down a slippery slope. The Manhattan Project is morally complicated, both because the intentions of those involved was complicated, and because the outcome was complicated. What's wrong to do, I think, is simplifying it down to "was good" or "was bad".
I don’t really understand the categories you’ve set up or the traditions you’re referring to, but it seems like consequentialist ethics would be good as a historical exercise, but not much else. Because we mostly don’t know what will happen when we act, at least not with the clarity that that kind of analysis would need. I think the implicit ethical problem here is that there’s not much any individual can do that will have a measurable effect when it comes to entities as large and powerful as big tech (or any other industry). So then how do you think about making ethical decisions?
> that I (and millions of other people less fortunate than me, that couldn't "afford" the non-ad-supported cost of these services) have benefited tremendously from the existence of Google and its ilk.
People who were into Google seem to tremendously overestimate the value it provided.
The only Google thing I ever used is Android, and only because it's too hard to avoid it.
Had there not been Google you'd have used alternative services, and your life would not have been much worse.
Yes, a similarly good search engine would have emerged, similar products would have been devised, and the internet would have been ad-supported as it already was before Google.
I used Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, etc in the era before Google - and it was worse.
If you're suggesting that some other company besides Google would have worked out the same algorithms and business plan, then this seems incoherent. Even if true, we'd be here discussing how much value we've gotten from Notgoogle. It's still a tremendous amount of value, whatever the company is named.
I am a security professional. My work directly affects the security of the systems I am responsible for. If I do my job well, people’s data is less likely to be stolen, leaked, intentionally corrupted, or held for ransom. I also influence privacy related decisions.
I work for a Mag7 company. The company has many divisions; the division I work for doesn’t seem to be doing anything that I would perceive as unethical, but other divisions of my company do behave in a way I consider unethical.
I’m not afraid to take an ethical stance; in a previous job at another company I have directly confronted my management chain about questionable behavior and threatened to quit (I ended up convincing them my position was correct).
So how do I reason about that? Really the sticking point is that large companies are not monoliths. Am I acting unethically for working for an ethical division of an imperfect company?
There are many ways to reason ethically about your situation, and you could start by using historical philosophers as inspiration.
Bentham might apply if you consider the overall outcome: is the work your company does positive or ethical for the majority of people the majority of the time? It seems like the “greatest good for the greatest number” would allow for some small unethical aspects so long as the outcome is good for the majority. This could also be seen as a shortcoming in that philosophy because it justifies some pretty terrible actions for the greater good (some of which, like the Manhattan project and its outcome, are mentioned elsewhere in this thread).
Kant might make you look at your company and imagine that all companies acted that way as a way to reason ethically. If all companies acted the way your company acts would that be good or bad for humanity? Kind of like the golden rule, but more rational.
There are many more to consider but it’s my view that most of them will get you to the point where you probably shouldn’t work for an unethical company, even if your particular work or area of focus is perfectly ethical. Mainly because you working for the company allows or helps it to exist in some way, and we don’t want unethical companies to exist. So maybe you could reason your way into working there if your sole focus was finding a way to destroy the company somehow. Otherwise it’s probably better to work elsewhere.
As an aside, I consider anything that actively subverts the company, beyond whistleblowing, as unethical, and in fact, it’s a threat that people like me have to defend against, so I would never involve myself in such activities.
I don't have an answer to your question, but I can give a method that usually helps me think about these things.
I try to find theoretical situations that I find easier to think about, and hence easier to judge on a moral level. Usually I construct these situations by going to extremes with certain variables. What if your company had one employee? What if all of humanity was its workforce?
For example, let's say your employer just employs you, and your job is to press a button every month that kills a random person and generates 30k dollars. That's a situation where I personally find it very easy to make a moral judgement.
Then, in very small increments, try and change this theoretical situation to more closely resemble the real thing. Maybe there's some context missing, maybe one of the variables is too extreme. And with each increment, try to pass judgement.
For example, you can change the kill button so that maybe the button has some positive effect (maybe it kills someone, but also cures two terminal cancer patients). Or maybe you want to increase the number of employees and see how that makes you feel.
It's not a silver bullet, but there's a chance that pursuing this mode of thought ends up enabling you to confidently assess your personal situation in morality. It's also not necessarily easy. It can be difficult to find the right starting point (there's more than one!), or the right incremental change (there's more than one!). I hope it may be of help.
For an example of this way of thinking you could look up Peter Singer's argument for charity, or the pro stem cell research argument which asks you to choose between saving little girl or a box of embryos from a burning building (I forget the origin).
An ethical absolutist would say "yes." But you might guess such a person is not very popular, as there is almost no aspect of simply being alive that could be considered ethical.
I dunno. I’m kind of with the sentiment in his original column, or at least how he paraphrased it. I think it’s naive to believe that you can bring about any real change in tech through moral suasion alone. The monetary payoffs are too large and there are too many people who will work for them no matter what. If you want to change some behavior that you find immoral, your best bet is to organize politically and pass laws.
> there are too many people who will work for them no matter what
BigTech was already struggling to hire the caliber of engineers they needed when I worked there (and I left 5 years ago), and a fair number of the best candidates were refusing on ethical grounds (in that era, mostly around Cambridge Analytic and Facebook's involvement in Myanmar, but also due to concerns about blatant marketing to teens).
I don't think it's a given that these companies can maintain a staff of thousands of top-tier engineers as they sink themselves ever deeper into the various ethical quagmires.
> But the belief in the magical power of the free market always to serve the public good has no theoretical basis.f In fact, our current climate crisis is a demonstrated market failure.
It's not a free market failure. It's an example of the Tragedy of the Commons.
The Commons is not owned by anyone, and so property rights are not in play. Property rights are essential to the proper functioning of the free market.
Technology scales lots of things. Including business models based on conflict of interest.
There were corporate conflicts of interest with respect to customers long before technology. But it took tech to create a community scrapbook, tied to a mass surveillance, psychology hacking and coercion flywheel, powered by hundreds of billions of dollars from third parties, and motivated by trillions of dollars of potential market cap.
Something has to give. Society is eventually going to have to come to terms with the fact that minor incidents of poor behavior, when scaled up with technology, can significantly degrade society.
Many things are illegal now, that in the far past would never have been considered a problem. Scale matters. And Internet tech scales.
Thank you! Great to see this message getting a bit of a platform.
As industry practicioners, we have the agency to force positive change in our field. If the government is too encumbered and the executives are too avaricious, that leaves us. If you want tech to do good things for people, work for a company that makes tech that does good things for people.
One ethical thing that some people on HN do, and more should: criticize big companies when they do something unethical, even if you'd want to work for them.
Yes, presumably, you will get on some company-wide hiring denylists. (Not because you're prominent, but because there will be routine LLM-powered "corporate fit" checks, against massive corpora and streams of ongoing surveillance capitalism monitoring of most things being said.)
Some things need to be said. And people need to not just hear it once, and forget it, but to hear it from many people, on an ongoing basis. So not saying it is being complicit.
> We must balance optimizing for oneself with optimizing for others, including the public good. So how does working for Big Tech thread this needle? This is the question that people who work for Big Tech must ask themselves.
This is a bullshit premise. Many people who worked at Google when I was there (including myself) sincerely believed that Google was good for society.
People sitting on the outside have an incorrect mental model of how people work at companies like this.
A very very small minority work there and think the company is evil. The ones who think that do not last long because it’s insufferable working with people drinking different koolaid. The same thing is true for working for Wall Street, defense contractors, drug companies, and whatever else you can think of.
If it’s a company that defines and leads the space, it’s likely filled with motivated employees that already think the company is doing the right thing.
So there is no ethical quandary of “what is good for me vs what is good for society” because the employee thinks he/she is doing good for society by working there.
> Uber skirted regulations, shrugged off safety issues, and presided over a workplace rife with sexual harassment.” Was it ethical to have worked at Uber under Kalanick?
This is the false dichotomy that doesn’t apply to people who drink the koolaid. If you think Uber has saved thousands of lives via reduced drunk driving and available rides out of bad areas, disrupting/ignoring local regulations is easy to justify. A leader who had sexual harassment issues is completely irrelevant because of “the mission”.
Implying that someone is unethical to be at Uber while that was going on makes as much sense as implying someone is unethical for being a research professor at Harvard when others there have published fraudulent papers at the same time.
> A very very small minority work there and think the company is evil.
I think that for every true believer in the "mission" of the company, there are two or three employees who choose not to closely scrutinize the ethics of the company's actions, because they are paid extraordinarily well.
I don't think my company is evil per se, but I do think that if we were optimizing for the good of humanity, rather than profit, our products would look rather different.
Regarding his ask that ACM dedicate itself to the public good, the IEEE is already there in its code of ethics.
> hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, to strive to comply with ethical design and sustainable development practices, to protect the privacy of others, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment
That code is pretty squarely at odds with big tech's latest malevolent aims.
> the belief in the magical power of the free market always to serve the public good has no theoretical basis
This needs to be repeated more often.
Early on, there was this idea that free market capitalism was inherently amoral, and we had to do things like "vote with your wallet" to enforce some kind of morality on the system. This has been gradually replaced with a pseudo-religious idea that there's some inherent "virtue" to capitalism. You just need to have faith in the system, and everything will magically work itself out.
It's good to see someone have the humility to lay out their strong previous position and then renounce it in plain language. So much public communication these days consists of hedging, back-pedaling, and other forms of strategic disavowal.
Breakthroughs in information technology always cause disruption in the political meaning (wars and chaos). It was like that when writing was invented (making big organized religions possible), it was the same with printing press (allowing reformation and big political movements), it was similar with radio (which allowed 20-th century style totalitarian regimes).
Each time the legacy powers struggled to survive and wars started. It took some time for the societies to adapt and regulate the new technologies and create a new stable equilibrium.
It's not surprising that it's the same with internet. We have unstable wild-west style information oligarchy forming before our eyes. The moguls build continent-spanning empires. There's no regulation, the costs are negligible, and the only ones trying to control it are the authoritarians. And the new oligarchs are obviously fighting with their thought-control powers against the regulation with all they've got.
I didn't think the Cambridge Analytica scandal had anything at all to do with computer science. I thought it had to do with business and hence business ethics.
I work on software for managing casinos. I feel morally superior. Big tech has real problems if working with gambling and weaponry is preferable to big tech.
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
I'm going to have to add that my list of favorite aphorisms. And it's not just salaries that drive this dynamic. It is difficult to get someone to understand something when their entire identity is invested in not understanding it. This applies to religions, political ideologies, and even to a lot of self-styled rationalism.
"But in my January 2019 Communications column,^b I dismissed the ethical-crisis vibe. I wrote, "If society finds the surveillance business model offensive, then the remedy is public policy, in the form of laws and regulations, rather than an ethics outrage." I now think, however, I was wrong."
The "ethics crisis", as described here, is the complaining of one ruling elite (traditional media, universities, bureaucrats, etc.) against another upcoming elite (tech). The problem is that all of the power is accruing to tech — at the expense of the competing, traditional elites.
An even bigger problem is that most of the economic and social benefits have come from technology. This even includes shorter work weeks and paid leave (typically falsely credited to unions) and greater disposable income, which have come from technology (broadly speaking) and not from activism.
A tech "ethics crisis" and the "dangerous" profit motive are just renewed attacks against capitalism, and "tech" is itself just the tip of the spear of capitalism (and the cultural nom de guerre of capitalism's elites).
Big Tech subverted the world’s longest running democracy and tipped a majority of the global population into authoritarian rule. An essay handwringing the question doesn’t seem very useful at this point.
Is that why people overwhelmingly voted for change in 2024, ironically to bring back the “dictator”?
Popular mandate, all of swing states, majority of governorships, house and the senate - seems as decisive a democratic choice as it can get!
Trump got lucky a bit with the immigration issue. There are 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the US. The barriers to removal that existed 15 years ago are mostly gone. Everyone is so connected now, finding illegals is straightforward data mining. The government data shows there is really no explanation why they aren't being removed. Even Obama deported huge numbers of illegals. It also didn't help that in exit polls Harris received less than 40% of the vote of married men and less than 40% of the vote of people identifying as Christian. I would say people voted for deportations and someone more old fashioned.
> Is Big Tech supporting the public good, and if not, what should Big Tech workers do about it?
The problem is not if Big Tech does support or does not support something. The problem is they have any opinion at all! The pitch is they are "platforms" and "arbiters" who decide like highest court. They should not have any opinions at all!
> In fact, our current climate crisis is a demonstrated market failure.
This wrong on so many levels. There is neither a climate crisis nor a market failure. If any, central economies exhibited (and exhibit) higher levels of pollution and destruction of public good.
Mindless repetition of the climate crisis trope has done more damage to the cause than carbon emissions.
I agree with the author that questions of ethics are social optimization problems.
> We must balance optimizing for oneself with optimizing for others
Yet if each person would optimize for themself, then the balancing is automatically taken care of. The invisible hand is even more free and dexterous on the social scale than the economic.
> the belief in the magical power of the free market always to serve the public good has no theoretical basis. In fact, our current climate crisis is a demonstrated market failure.
The power of the free market is at least as theoretically and empirically sound as the climate crisis.
I think this is naive, because a flaw of such free market thinking is its failure to price in externalities. That’s what the relationship with the climate crisis link was about.
How is the environment, which is directly of concern to the primary economic sector, and to the entire economic enterprise in the long run, an externality?
The problem with optimising exclusively for oneself is that you definitionally optimise at the expense of others. Gaps are easily widened, and your balancing idea falls apart when the scales are tipped from the start.
It is not as simple as "my profit" vs. "others' expense". The elegance of the invisible hand theory is that it also accounts for the cases where others' expense is my expense and others' benefit is my benefit just as well as the others.
The scales sure can be tipped on the individual level, but you are only considering the "one individual vs. one individual" case. Many cliques of extreme power have been taken down by the weaker majority, which is also one of the processes contributing to the collapse of monopolies.
The person is arguing whether it is good or bad to work for Big Tech. I wouldn't hate the players when you really should hate the game. Most of the populace is largely unaware of surveillance or why they are using products that have a negative influence. Stopping to work for Big Tech does not change this lack of education. Advocating that privacy should be respected or even supporting laws that would regulate large technology companies has been attempted to be implemented by the ACLU and EFF, but it isn’t really practical when you can hire lobbyists for around $1 million dollars, which you can use to get passed nearly anything you want. Also, Big Tech may need fewer people to achieve its goals, so I think this post is too little and too late.
And he doesn't even get around to mentioning that Google (and Amazon) are providing AI computing to Israel even though Google's own lawyer warned that they could be used to violate human rights. Their lawyers wrote: "Google Cloud services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations, including Israeli activity in the West Bank.”
It gets worse, they got advice and then didn't follow it:
"Google reportedly sought input from consultants including the firm Business for Social Responsibility (BSR). Consultants apparently recommended that the contract bar the sale and use of its AI tools to the Israeli military 'and other sensitive customers,' the report says. Ultimately, the [Google] contract reportedly didn’t reflect those recommendations."
"I bemoaned that humanity seems to be serving technology rather than the other way around. I argued that tech corporations have become too powerful and their power must be curtailed."
That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech".
It shows up in "tech" because "tech" scales so well and has such strong network effects. But the US's tolerance of monopoly is the real cause. There need to be about four major players before markets push prices down. The US has three big banks, two big drugstore chains, etc.
Tough antitrust enforcement would help. Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other.
Tough labor law enforcement would help. No more "gig worker" jobs that are exempt from labor law. No more "wage shaving". No more unpaid overtime. Prorate medical insurance payments based on hours, so companies that won't pay people for more than 30 hours a week pay their fraction of medical insurance. A minimum wage high enough that people making it don't need food stamps.
> Prorate medical insurance payments based on hours, so companies that won't pay people for more than 30 hours a week pay their fraction of medical insurance
Attaching medical insurance to one's job is a market distortion caused by government tax policy. I.e. it enables one to buy insurance with pre-tax dollars rather than after-tax dollars. Making medical insurance premiums fully tax-deductible would fix that.
> A minimum wage high enough that people making it don't need food stamps.
That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more. Nobody is going to hire people who cost more than the value they produce.
> Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other.
Google is already in trouble because AI is disrupting their search/advertisement business model.
I'd be careful about destroying big business. The US is only part of the world. Destroying US big business means other countries will have those companies, and it's lose lose for the US. Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
> Attaching medical insurance to one's job is a market distortion caused by government tax policy
Here in the US, FDR had a wage freeze as part of his policies [1] to deal with the continuing Great Depression that WWII had not stopped yet by 1942. Because of that, companies needed to get inventive about ways to increase benefits but not illegally increase wages. Companies started offering insurance plans.
That's where the employment/insurance coupling started.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942
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It’s not that simple. Pretax premiums could be wiped out with the stroke of a pen.
I worked at an entity with 300+ thousand employees and Probably another 200k retirees… I was able to pay full cost to retain my health insurance from them.
The benefits and out of pocket costs are incredible - my current CEO asked me why I do that rather that use the company insurance and I walked through it with him. It’s not possible to buy that coverage, between the legacy insurance plan and huge risk pool, only the largest entities can have the best insurance.
The “simple answer” is pretty easy. Put a 10% payroll tax with a $5M income cap, and build out Medicare with whatever benefits are doable under that cost structure. Let the market compete for extended benefits, which would work like a traditional insurance market.
The doctors and medical industries would be happy. People would gain newfound job mobility and freedom. Most people would save money vs the payments they make today. Rich people would be sad because taxes.
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> Attaching medical insurance to one's job is a market distortion caused by government tax policy. I.e. it enables one to buy insurance with pre-tax dollars rather than after-tax dollars.
Also the ACA Employer Mandate[1]. Get rid of that and maybe figure out some sort of "nutrition label" style thing to make it easier to compare offers that are more cash vs more benefits.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/employer-s...
First, private insurance shouldn't exist at all. It is rent-seeking of the highest order. There's no need for it. The US is the only country that works this way.
But let's put that aside. What we have now isn't amarket distortion caused by using pre-tax dollars for employer insurance. It's that an employer can collectively bargain for insurance in a way that an individual never can.
If you have 100,000 people in a group then statistical norms come into play of how often you'll need to do a transplant or [insert expensive procedure here]. Plus you have the negotiating power to get better coverage at a lower price than an individual ever can.
So individual insurance can never work regardless of tax policy. Tying insurance to employment is bad for pretty obvious reasons. And this is how we return to "private insurance shouldn't exist".
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> That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more.
This doesn't actually bear out. Minimum wage increases really don't have a history of making minimum wage employees unemployable, or destroying the companies affected. In fact, the opposite tends to happen, as these businesses tend to be frequented by other minimum wage employees as customers, so it ends up being a rising tide that lifts all boats.
> Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
I'd argue that you can't just airdrop these companies into another country and have them be as successful as they are. Even with much stricter monopoly laws, there is a LOT about America that incentivizes these companies to locate there, and frankly I'm not convinced they'd move.
And as a Canadian, I don't even want Big Tech to be American. =) The US is only part of the world, as you said, but your lax and corrupt legal system is polluting the world with these dangerous megacorps.
Don't get me wrong, we're none better, our system would allow for nearly the same abuse, were it not for the fact that our whole country is smaller in population that California. But the point remains that there's a lot of the world that is looking on in horror at these rampaging monster companies and is not in any way assured by the "at least they're American" defense.
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>That just makes those people unemployable
Or, put differently, it makes the profits of the companies who hire them unsustainable. IMO allowing an non-livable wage in order to subsidize profits isn't a great policy.
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Americans will consider anything other than a proper public health system. Like a hare-brained scheme of pro rating insurance premiums to hours worked, whatever the fuck that means. Or making insurance premiums tax deductible. Just utter stupidity at every turn.
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> Making medical insurance premiums fully tax-deductible would fix that.
They more or less are, for those who pay for their own health insurance.
Why would have the same rule for those who receive health insurance as part of an overall W2/labor-based compensation contract?
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> That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more. Nobody is going to hire people who cost more than the value they produce.
Good, a job that cannot support biological needs should not exist. It’s not a viable business.
Why should I pay a stealth subsidy to whatever business it is.
> Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
This excuse was used to start wars, trample civil rights and employment rights. It basically means we must become like China to beat China. What would be the point?
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Is there some evidence that big american companies are less negative than big [insert adversary of the decade] are?
Companies are not bound by morals, national identity, or any interest other than self-perpetuation. They are a virus that we harness to do good. When the virus overwhelms its host, its time for medicine.
>Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
So true - imagine an iPhone made in China - the horror.
> Making medical insurance premiums fully tax-deductible would fix that.
...or alternatively, removing deductions for medical insurance.
> That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more. Nobody is going to hire people who cost more than the value they produce.
You're subsidizing those wages with your tax dollars. You're paying billions per year to make those low incomes livable. In the end it's just corporate welfare:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
https://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/a-downward-push-the-impact-...
It's not the case that they wouldn't employ people. They're not employing people now out of the goodness of their heart.
If they paid living wages (as they should) you'd pay less. Good businesses pay their costs.
But as it is, the likes of Walmart and McDonald's are privatizing their profits and socializing their costs.
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I think an under-discussed issue is how companies are allowed to own sub-companies that don't need to necessarily disclose they're owned by a larger conglomerate. Like I don't know how you necessarily solve this, but I think if people, for example, knew the sheer number of snack brands owned by Nabisco, there would be a lot more discussion about corporate consolidation and monopolies.
> sheer number of snack brands owned by Nabisco
Also Yum and Roark, which, together, own much of fast food.
> That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech".
There is a general problem with corporatism and monopoly, but there are also specific problems with "tech". Oil & gas monopolies don't broadly carry everyone's private interactions. Sports monopolies generally can't expose political dissidents.
>Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other.
I admire the general spirit of your comment, but this specific example seems off to me. Search and browsers, for example, don't make sense as independent businesses. Rather, they are products based off of Ads.
Maybe the idea would be for Ads to pay Search to include their ads, and for Search to pay Browsers to be the default search engine?
Apple should also be broken up into hardware/os, app store, services, payments, media
Your car shouldn't decide who you can do business with nor should it get a fee from every store you drive to. It shouldn't push it's own payment system for all purchases. And neither should a pocket computer do these things
Antitrust enforcement is so hit-or-miss, contingent upon risky prosecution in court and a DOJ willing to undertake it, and with no ability to scale. It has made me wonder whether a statutory approach may be better, where companies past a certain [relative] size threshold would need to split up. Then it would be no surprise to shareholders and consumers wouldn’t need to be harmed for years before maybe regulators would dare step in. I think it would do a lot for the US competitively, too, to ensure the market remains dynamic. Sustained vigorous competition seems likelier to serve us better in the long run than boosterism of our largest companies.
> corporatism and monopoly, not "tech"
Yes and: Corporatocracy
> strong network effects
Yes and: aka Preferential attachment leading to winner-takes-all.
It's just math. Not some kind of weird moralistic blather.
The tendency towards concentration necessitates some counter balance, backpressure, redistribution, whatever.
> need to be about four major players before markets push prices down.
Yes and: I believe, but cannot prove, unifying markets (nationalization, globalization) accelerated monopolization.
Alas, I don't have any ideas on how to put the toothpaste back into the tube. Clearly, we're not reverting to regionalism or localism any time soon. Economically or politically.
> "I bemoaned that humanity seems to be serving technology rather than the other > way around. I argued that tech corporations have become too powerful and their > power must be curtailed." > That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech".
If you wound enjoy a deep and rigorous treatment of this subject, I strongly recommend Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology."
He argues that modern technology is fundamentally different from historical technology, and that corporatism and monopoly are the inevitable result of technology.
The US cellular market has T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T and a bunch of mvnos. Dish is starting out and a few years back we had Sprint before it merged with TMobile.
I wouldn’t say the competitiveness changed all that much and I would say it’s more competitive than Canada with also 3 and less competitive than France with 4. However the competitiveness in France now is specifically because a low cost provider Free entered and started stealing all the costumers rather than because of the number of competitors.
I disagree. It's a problem with tech because even if regulations exist, new tech moves much faster than regulation. And technology is too seductive to be used properly so people indeed end up serving tech just as drug addicts live for their habit. Many more details are explained in "The Metaphysics of Technology" by David Skrbina or "The Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul.
Technology has a tendency to overwhelm and transform everything for the sake of technology.
It is an even more generic problem than that since it also applies to bureaucracy and by extension the government.
While I agree with you on the basic issue of monopolies, I think the biggest monopoly problem is the U.S. government. It's so massive that it absolutely dwarfs all other monopolies, like Google.
I would therefore like a solution that does not, in any way whatsoever, increase the power of the US government.
Empires tend to have defining characteristics that are both the reason they become empires in the first place and ultimately what is their undoing.
The British Empire was the drug dealer empire (first tobacco then opium).
The US is the arms dealer empire, at least since WWI.
The point here is that I believe that any sufficiently large company in the US eventually becomes a defense contractor and thus aligns itself with US foreign policy [1].
So we have Amazon selling cloud services to the CIA, Google selling cloud services to the military and Israel, Meta cooperating with military uses of AI and so on.
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/153044/big-techs-unholy-alli...
> The US has three big banks
? I thought we still had the big four? Chase, BoA, Citi, WF? And if you're talking about just consumer banking, US Bank is only ~30% behind #4 (Citi).
Wells Fargo, maybe.[1]
And we need Glass-Stegall back. Banks and brokerages should be separate. There is no good reason that Goldman Sachs should be a bank, other than for bailouts, which is why they became a bank.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WFC/wells-fargo/to...
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The US also has a relatively huge amount of small banks that are specialized in financing niches. It’s actually a huge competitive advantage. If I want a bank that specializes in loans for PNW fishing boats, that exists, and they are able to competitively price a loan that BoA won’t even consider.
The flip side is that big banks are great at driving down costs for standard operations (when there are enough of them to be competitive). If all I need is a business checking account as a consultant, I can access that for no cost via one of the giants.
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> There need to be about four major players before markets push prices dow
Not at all sure that prices are the problem here, nor that markets can solve the actual problems.
This is a Gish Gallop of completely unrelated things.
Tech companies can become very powerful without holding a monopoly. All it takes is being big enough to have political sway either through being a big employer or just by straight up lobbying.
The US has a few big banks and then hundreds of regional banks. It’s trivial to bank without using the big ones.
Prohibiting a post breakup Google from contracting with each other is completely idiotic. Either they make sense as standalone businesses or they don’t. Why wouldn’t Google search be allowed to use GCP but be allows to use AWS? If they are different companies they will use what is best for the company and regulating that they use something worse is bad for everyone.
Min wage unrelated
Gig job unrelated
Medical insurance unrelated
The hyperfocus on shareholder returns is also worth mentioning. It's tangentially related to a monopolistic trajectory. Instead of a company being really good at solving problems in a particular domain they attempt to serve many mediocre solutions in a variety of domains. Shareholders, VCs, and the like encourage this lack of focus on quality and replace it with a focus on margins. The solution for low margins is lower head count and greater diversification of SKUs. For many companies, it's a recipe for enshittification and spirals into mediocrity. Not to mention, when a company enters this phase the lives of employees begin to suffer greatly.
What's that got to do with corporatism?
> Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other.
Why Google? Every single day there are articles here on HN with many comments explaining that Google is done due to LLMs replacing search.
Google market cap: $2.3 bn
Microsoft market cap: $3.2 bn
Break up Microsoft. And for good this time.
You mean trillions, not billions
Monopolies in US? Which bad product you are forced to buy because there's no competition at all?
Having monopolies is not a symptom of government negligence. It's the system working as intended.
> All of us must navigate the trade-off between “me” and “we.” A famous Talmudic quote states: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?” We must balance optimizing for oneself with optimizing for others, including the public good... To take an extreme example, Big Tobacco surely does not support the public good, and most of us would agree that it is unethical to work for Big Tobacco. The question, thus, is whether Big Tech is supporting the public good, and if not, what should Big Tech workers do about it.
The duty to align your professional life ethically scales with your ability to do so. I personally don't cast aspersions on anyone working in tobacco farms or in a gas station selling cigarettes; they're just trying to get by. But if you're one or two levels up Maslow's Pyramid, it's right to weigh your personal needs against the impact of your work. You'll also be better off for it, knowing that the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.
I'll also say: there are ways to contribute morally outside of your 9-5. Volunteer to teach a neighborhood kid to code. Show your local sandwich shop how to set their hours online, or maybe even build them a cookie cutter Squarespace site. Donate a small fraction of your salary (eg 0.5% local, 0.5% global) to causes you believe in, and scale up over the years.
I worked for almost 27 years, for a company that aligned with my personal morals. The pay was substantially less than what I could have made at less-circumspect outfits, and there was a nonzero amount of really annoying overhead, but I don't regret it, at all. I slept well at night, made good friends, never wrote any software that I regretted, learned heaps of stuff, and helped to develop and launch the careers of a few others.
Mentioning that here, elicits scorn.
> Mentioning that here, elicits scorn.
No it doesn't. "Woe is ethical me" comments like this might.
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Not from me, it doesn't. That's enviable and I'm glad to hear you were able to have that.
Geez, where do I sign up?
Sounds great. Don't listen to the pseudo-realists who chase dreams of grandeur rather than doing something (at least semi-) useful or good with their lives.
I imagine the scorn would occur if you planted a flag about how the company morals aligned with your own.
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Almost same here, but I also understand that it's a luxury. At this point in my life I can afford it, but I've also seen times when I could do anything to get food on table for my family. Luckily for me those times didn't last.
Have a dose of anti-scorn from me. What qualifies any one of us to tell another that they're living their life wrong?
My opinion after reading HN for quite a while is that your average HN poster is well educated and knows a lot of theory but struggles with ethics. Perhaps even seeing a debate against ethics as a game to be won.
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I don't think people are scornful of your work. It makes me happy to hear that people still find meaningful employment within their means of living. It's increasingly rare that someone is paid to do something impactful these days. You should feel happy.
The part that will attract scorn is pretending that everyone can do that. In the same way that religion spread by preying on the poor and lecherous portions of society, so too does the tech industry offer the downtrodden and mistreated a better life in exchange for moral leniency. It's not even the "revenge of the nerd" stuff past a certain point - if a $60,000/year software engineer in America turns up their nose to a contract, you can simply send it to a development firm in Pakistan for pennies on the dollar and get roughly equivalent results. There is no moral bartering with at-will employment. It's an illusion.
As individuals, you and I are both powerless to stop the proliferation and success of harmful businesses. America's number one lesson from the past 4 centuries of economic planning is that laissez-faire policy does not course-correct without government intervention. Collective bargaining only works when you're bargaining on a market you control - boycotting certain employers is entirely ineffective when you compare it to legislative reform.
So, with that being said, saving your dignity is not enough to save society. You have every right to take comfort in working a job that you respected - but nobody here owes you any more respect than their dairy farmers or the guy in Thailand that made their $55 Izod sweatshirt. If you come around expecting the hero treatment, then you're bound to feel shortchanged. Sorry.
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> The duty to align your professional life ethically scales with your ability to do so.
I think this implies that we all should aim to have for everybody those abilities. That is, if somebody is unable, in this sense, to be ethical because he's just trying to get by, it's actually our problem - e.g. he sells cigarettes and that harms us. So we need to some extent work on the goal of everybody having abilities to live ethically.
Yes, we could tax higher incomes until we've reached that goal.
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There's a lot of beneficial things that might happen if we, as a society, worked at helping the Invisible Hand manifest. Especially if we also ceased putting so much effort into fighting it.
One of the basic tenets of capitalism is that the exchanges are all voluntary. In practice they are quite clearly not.
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Most people want to judge others and rationalize their own behavior, while piling on to whatever views happen to be popular at the time.
What's worse, working for Big Tobacco, or working for Big Tech, or working for the DEA and spending your days forcefully "civil forfeituring" innocent people's money without charges? The former are at least taking money from people who voluntarily surrender it in exchange for some service, with fairly good knowledge of what they're getting themselves into. While the latter are basically highway robbers. Yet society has chosen to popularize the first one as immoral, and is now working on villifying the second, with only scant mention of the third.
I'm sure I'm guilty of selective outrage myself. If we're going to quote religious references, how about Christ admonishing those who point out the spec in their neighbor's eye, while ignoring the log in their own.
More focus on one's own morality, and less on judging others, just might make the world a slightly better place.
Highly highly disagree. It seems to me the opposite!
People (incl. here) want to rationalise their behaviour by giving excuses — such as the very popular "but X is even worse and people don't complain about it" that you yourself are doing — for the fact that they work on in-ethical stuff, because the honest answer is simply "this pays cartloads of money, fuck you got mine", which is unpalatable to their own self-perception.
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It's at least plausible that someone at the DEA genuinely wants to make a nicer, safer world for themselves and their neighbors. Yes, the agency does the terrible things you mention, but it also gets some horrific stuff off the streets. (Think fentanyl and meth, not weed. I couldn't care less about that.)
No one working for Big Tobacco thinks they're making the world better unless they're an idiot.
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I made the choice to change my occupation for a more moral one. One issue is, you lose a lot of social credit doing so. It’s seen as a personal failure rather than a choice. It might also be that implicitly challenging their choices makes people uncomfortable.
How do you meet people who take responsibility for their life design?
> One issue is, you lose a lot of social credit doing so. It’s seen as a personal failure rather than a choice.
Hmmm, why?
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My counter argument is that the US is already the most charitable country in the world in terms of private contributions, yet there are maybe 10-20 countries where the common people are better off than we are (note the large error bar there). I speculate that private charity versus private anti-charity is like bringing a knife to a gun fight.
This simplistic view of the world does not scale -- especially so in today's global economy. Imagine we never had public education and instead relied on the good nature of individuals to teach their neighborhood kids. Imagine competing at a global level without a coordinated educational system with baseline standards. Instead, what we need is to teach every kid how to code (many may not end up coding as a profession, but that's fine; every kid that has the affinity and talent and and wants to do it should have the chance).
That's nominally why we have government of the people, by the people, for the people. That's why we have taxes. These scale when the interests are aligned. We've seen them scale.
The problem arises when (as Mitt Romney famously expressed) we think of corporations as people, too, and assign them rights associated with personhood.
They are of "some" people, by "some" people, for "some" people.
This is the crisis I think the US is having now. This is what it think was punctuated with COVID; there is no longer the spirit of "we" and the US is in the era of "me".
Yes. However, just like someone considering dinner might falsely convince themselves 'I will eat this broccoli and this cheesecake and it will balance out to mostly healthy,' teaching some neighborhood kids to code won't ethically offset evil professional work, nor will donating a trivial fraction of your share of the ill-gotten proceeds.
> knowing that the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.
I don't understand what you're weighing this against? A job that is literally saving lives maybe, or really leading in a field of science or technology?
Most of us don't have that though, even here on hacker news. Most of us are part of a larger effort that will progress just as well without us, our personal impact is marginal at best.
I've worked in tech for two decades for a company I deem "moral" and I feel I've had impact. But I could have fitted kitchens or made wedding cakes for that time and had just as positive an impact on the world and people I serve professionally. Hell, if I was a carpenter my work could probably outlast anything I've done in tech.
This is a point too rarely made.
Most work that produces something people are willing to pay for does make the world a better place!
Not enormously so for the vast majority of us, but what one person out of 8 billion can do.
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That last part makes me a bit nervous. It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.
I don't think that's the point you're making, but it's good to be careful with that. You can do good after hours, but it doesn't absolve you from what you're doing 9-to-5.
As to your first point: yes, but it's all relative. Most tech workers are "trying to get by" in their minds. Just look at the SFBA rents and the PG&E bills! And wait until you hear about their college loans... most people in the top 1% don't think about themselves as the top 1%.
In the end, making good decisions often requires sacrifice, pretty much no matter how much you make. And we often find ways to rationalize why it's not the right time for that.
What confuses me is how many people are evidently in the job of "ruthless exec" and then they do it amorally. I can't think of any time in my life that I've seen an exec say: no, we could do that, but we shouldn't because it's wrong. No doubt because anyone who acts that way gets naturally-selected out of the job.
But also there seems to be a pervasive belief, which if anything feels way strong than it was when I was younger (maybe because the moral-majority christian-nation vibes have fully disappeared, in the US at least? sure, it was always fairly hollow, but at least it was a thing at all), that a business leader is not supposed to do moral things, because it's not their job description; their job truly is "increase shareholder value on a 6-12 month timescale", and if they try to do something different they are judged negatively!
So maybe there is in theory good to be done by being an exec and being more moral than average (maybe not a tobacco exec, but, say, in tech?). But the system is basically designed to prevent you from doing it? It almost seems as though modern model of shareholder capitalism is almost designed to keep things this way: to eliminate the idea at any point that a person should feel bad if they just do the "efficient", shareholder-value-maximizing thing. Nobody has any agency in the big machine, which means no one is accountable for what it does. Perfect, just how we like it? Whereas at least a private enterprise which is beholden to the principles of its leader could in principle do something besides the most cynical possible play at every turn.
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> It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.
That's not an EA belief. While EAs have made arguments somewhat in this direction, being a tobacco exec is just incredibly harmful and no one should do it: https://80000hours.org/2016/01/just-how-bad-is-being-a-ceo-i...
(80000 Hours is the primary EA career advising organization)
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> But if you're one or two levels up Maslow's Pyramid, it's right to weigh your personal needs against the impact of your work. You'll also be better off for it, knowing that <b>the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears</b> and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.
To highlight this part of the original in support of this comment. This comes of as somewhat arrogant and is a pretty big red flag...
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>It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.
You're saying this as if it's a given, but why wouldn't this work?
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But if you won’t be the big tabacco exec, someone else will.
So I actually agree with the notion that being the big tabacco exec and doing good things with your money, plus helping steer things from the inside is a better proposition than becoming a baker and letting someone who has NO moral qualms with tabacco run the ship.
It’s rarely as effective to push change from the outside as it is the inside.
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Trying to stop people from growing and selling marijuana didn't work out so well.
> The duty to align your professional life ethically scales with your ability to do so.
Humans respond to incentives. We seek rewards that may be monetary, social, or intellectual: we optimize our behavior for them all the same. Trying to improve the world by scolding people for acting according to their incentives will not work. It's not a serious position. "If everyone would just..." --- no, everyone is not going to just, and if they were, they'd have already done it. Your exhortation will make no difference.
If you want to change the world, change the incentive structure. Don't expect people to act against their personal interests because you say so. At best, they'll ignore you. At worst, they'll maliciously comply and cause even more harm.
One’s conscience is part of one’s incentives. And talking to people can actually affect their conscience. Public discourse like the one taking place here is part of the factors that can cause cultural shifts.
I think Moshe is right but chose a really poor analogy in Big Tobacco, I want to say because working in tech is not at all like a farmer working laboriously in a physical field which is a lot less ideological and more driven by being in a poor 3rd world country, etc.
"And while you were paying attention to these things, you were momentarily delivered from daydreams, from memories, from anticipations, from silly notions - from all the symptoms of you."
"Isn't tasting me?"
...
"I'd say it was halfway between me and not-me. Tasting is not-me doing something for the whole organism.
And at the same time tasting is me being conscious of what's happening. And that's the point of our chewing-grace - to make the me more conscious of what the not-me is up to."
--Aldous Huxley, Island
Morality is completely subjective. Prior to certain events in the last year I would’ve said that there were some objective standards like minimizing harm to children, but that’s out the window now, with most of Big Tech implicated.
As a moderately less contentious example, Alex Karp argues fervently that it is immoral to not produce weapons of war for western countries and the U.S. in particular. Many people agree with him. Ultimately people justify their method of making a living in whichever way they choose, and tech workers are no different. History is the log of the winners and losers of the war between the adherents of different moral codes.
Morality is not completely subjective. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/701478
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> "It is immoral to not produce weapons of war for western countries and the US in particular"
I cannot imagine that a substantial "many" people believe this. How does it work exactly? If you have any expertise even adjacent to weapons building (e.g. being a programmer) and you are not building weapons for the US due to a lack of effort (as opposed to failing the interview) you're doing something immoral?
I don't think many would agree with this. I suppose his stance is somehow more nuanced? (I wouldn't agree with it either, but at least it would be slightly more reasonable).
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I did development work for casino bosses.
Clearly immoral. IMO more so than weapons.
I realy needed the job
>Prior to certain events in the last year I would’ve said that there were some objective standards like minimizing harm to children, but that’s out the window now, with most of Big Tech implicated.
You're saying as if it's indisputable that "Big Tech" was harming children, but we're nowhere close to that. At best, the current literature shows a very weak negative correlational relationship between social media use and mental health. That's certainly not enough to lambast "Big Tech" for failing to abide by "objective standards like minimizing harm to children".
Moreover I question whether "objective standards like minimizing harm to children" existed to begin with, or we're just looking at the past with rose tinted glasses. During the industrial revolution kids worked in factories and mines. In the 20th century they were exposed to lead and particulate pollution. Even if you grant that "Big Tech" was harming kids in some way, I doubt they're doing it in some unprecedented way like you implied.
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Our intelligence agencies have long recognized that individuals burdened by debt are vulnerable to coercion and manipulation. It's time we acknowledge that the H1-B visa program creates a similar dynamic. The program’s restrictive rules effectively hang over visa holders like the sword of Damocles, leaving them perpetually at risk and easily controlled.
We’ve already seen how Twitter, under Musk’s leadership, has exploited this system to erode user protections in favor of appeasing his ego. When such moral compromises are normalized at the top, their effects inevitably cascade downward, influencing broader organizational norms and behaviors.
Around the time I was born, my dad was in the army and was taught in an intelligence class that "financial problems" is one of the most exploitable facets of a person by nation states. I don't really know much about his work, but it sounded like his role was particularly at-risk from nation states trying to pull information from him.
What's interesting though is that around that time we basically had no money and support from the military! We lived in a roach-infested home and barely had money for groceries! It absolutely blows me away that my family could barely support itself considering the known-and-taught risks of such a situation.
When he told me about that I asked him why they didn't pay the family more, considering the risks. He hadn't considered it even once before that conversation.
> It's time we acknowledge that the H1-B visa program creates a similar dynamic. The program’s restrictive rules effectively hang over visa holders like the sword of Damocles, leaving them perpetually at risk and easily controlled.
This is why I went through the pain and cost of sponsoring my own O1 and later EB instead of relying on an employer or spousal visa. You just cannot be a full participant with someone who can get you kicked out of the country on 10 day notice.
> leaving them perpetually at risk and easily controlled.
I'd use a stronger term here, for some more nefarious companies can both exploit and abuse employees on a H1b visa limitation. Now go work 60 hour weeks for less than your peers!!
I worked it back from stronger language originally in the hope that it would be more easily palatable. I completely agree with your point
> It's time we acknowledge that the H1-B visa program creates a similar dynamic....leaving them perpetually at risk and easily controlled.
By associating this to the subject of the post, are you implying that the perpetrators of unethical tech in the U.S. are mainly foreign workers, and not "homegrown" citizens?
No, to interpret it in a way that suggests that's it's mainly foreign workers would be extrapolating beyond what I said. I believe the worker-employee dynamic is fundamentally unbalanced[1] in favor of employer leverage over employees. I simply believe that this same dynamic is exaggerated when it comes to H1-B workers. It's simply easier to examine a social relation when it's more apparent.
1. Workers' choice of employment does not come close to ameliorating the disadvantage. Every argument against this is a coping mechanism.
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> perpetually at risk and easily controlled
I would like to see two changes. One, better oversight of the job categories and their prevailing wage (no more creating new categories with low wages). Two, more freedom for the immigrant to switch jobs at will so long as their job family doesn’t change.
These changes are pro-worker (both resident and immigrant) because they remove the main benefits of hiring foreign labor and prevent undercutting wages. They are changes that I believe SWEs as a class should be in favor of.
What is the relationship between this blog post and the H1-B visa program? And are you saying that Twitter has exploited the H-1B program to erode user protections?
It seems like you're just trying to shoehorn some kind of unrelated anti-Musk sentiment into a discussion that has nothing to do with H-1B visas or Elon Musk?
No, they (and every other BigTech) exploit it to erode worker protections.
Which in turn contributes to eroding user protections, since unprotected workers aren't really in a position to put up a fight when management tells them to do something unethical.
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What „user protections“ were eroded at Twitter/X? Or do you just mean it became less woke?
just yesterday the owner of twitter was getting his employees to delete the accounts of posts he disagreed with
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Couldn't disagree more about Elon. I'm just glad there was someone able to open up free speech again on a social media platform and reveal for all to see the level of censorship (by surrogacy) by the govt.I think we might be in a very dark place indeed if this level of govt corruption was allowed to persist for even a few more years.
> I'm just glad there was someone able to open up free speech again on a social media platform
It ain't free if someone can buy it.
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What a terribly unfortunate time for you to foolishly choose to die on that particular of hill trying to defend Elon Musk's dedication to free speech. It says as much about your lack of situational awareness and tenuous grasp of reality and current events, as it does about Elon Musk's thin skinned hypocrisy and contempt for the free speech of anyone but himself.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-accused-...
>Elon Musk accused of censoring conservatives on X who disagree with him about immigration. The claims came after Elon Musk was involved in a public feud with some Republicans over immigration.
Image boards like 4chan are quite free, even without Elon
Huh?
There is still censorship by surrogacy. It’s just that now they censor things you don’t like being said, so you don’t mind as much. For you it’s not a problem as long as the people being censored have a world view or narrative contrary to your own. But that’s not the same as being a free speech supporter.
That’s being a supporter of free speech for you. Not for anyone else.
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It’s weird that all of the biggest fans of free speech seem to love NDAs so much.
I worked in Big Tech and it changed my life financially so I can’t judge anyone else for doing it, but I will say that I had a moral reckoning while I was there and I am (right now) unwilling to go back.
At the time (2012-2022) the things about the business model that bothered me were surveillance culture, excessive advertising, and monopoly power. Internally I was also horrified at the abuse of “vendor/contractor” status to maintain a shadow workforce which did a lot of valuable work while receiving almost none of the financial benefits that the full-time workforce received.
3 years later all of those concerns remain but for me they’re a distant second behind the rise of AI. There’s a non-zero chance that AI is one of the most destructive creations in human history and I just can’t allow myself to help advance it until I’m convinced that chance is much closer to zero. I’m in the minority I know, so the best case scenario for me is that I’m wrong and everyone getting rich on AI right now has gotten rich for bringing us something good, not our doom.
I’m curious as to how you think it’ll be our doom. As for the ethics in it, there are two ways to look at it in my opinion. One is yours, the other is to accept that AI is coming and at least work to help your civilisation “win”. I doubt we’ll see any form of self aware AI in our lifetimes, but the AI tools are obviously going to become extremely powerful tool. I suspect we’ll continue heading down the “cyberpunk” road leading to the dystopian society we read about in the 80/90ies, but that’s not really the doom of mankind as such. It just sucks.
As a former history major I do think it’ll be interesting to follow how AI shifts the power balances. We like to pretend that we’ve left the “might makes right” world behind, but AI is an arms race, and it’ll make some terrible weapons. Ethics aside you’re going to want to have the best of those if you want your civilisation to continue being capable or deciding which morals it wants to follow.
I don't think most are primarily concerned about war applications, but simply driving mass unemployment.
This even seems to be the exact goal of many who then probably imagine the next step would then be some sort of basic income to keep things moving, but the endless side effects of this transition make it very unclear if this is even economically feasible.
At best, it would seem to be a return to defacto feudalism. I think 'The Expanse' offered a quite compelling vision of what "Basic" would end up being like in practice.
Those who are seen (even if through no fault of their own) as providing no value to society - existing only to consume, will inevitably be marginalized and ultimately seen as something less than.
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> how you think it’ll be our doom
There's 2 main possibilities:
1) Self aware AI with its own agency / free will / goals. This is much harder to predict and is IMO less likely with the current approaches so i'll skip it.
2) A"I" / ML tools will become a force multiplier and the powerful will be even more so. Powerful people and organizations (including governments) already have access to much more data about individuals than ordinary citizens. But currently you usually need loyal people to sift through data and to act on it.
With advanced ML tools, you can analyze every person's entire personality, beliefs, social status, etc. And if they align with your goals, you can promote them, if not, you can disadvantage them.
2a) This works if you're a rich person deciding whose medical bills you will pay (and one such person was recently killed for abusing this power).
2b) This works if you're a rich person owning a social network by deciding who's opinions will be more or less visible to others. You can shape entire public discourse and make entire opinions and topics invisible to those who have not already been exposed to them. For example one such censored topic in western discourse is when the use of violence is justified and moral. The west, at least for now, is willing to celebrate moral acts of violence in the past (French revolution, American civil war, assassination of Reinhard Heydrich) but discussion of situations where violence should be used in recent times is taboo and "banned" on many centrally moderated platforms.
2c) And obviously nation states have insane amount of info on both their own citizens and those from other nation states. They already leads to selective enforcement (everybody is guilty of something) and it can get even worse when the government becomes more totalitarian. Can you imagine current China ever having a revolution and reinstating democracy? I can't because any dissent will be stopped before it reaches critical mass.
So states which are currently totalitarian are very unlikely to restore democracy and states which are currently democracies are prone to increasingly totalitarian rule by manipulation from rich individuals - see point 2b.
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I think the AI investor class wants to find a way to have it replace a large amount of human labor. I think if they succeed this will damage our society irreparably which, like it or not, only works well when people have jobs.
I’m also very worried about AI spam and impersonation eroding all interpersonal trust online which has obvious disastrous consequences.
While unemployment certainly deserves a conversation of its own, I think the more overlooked aspects of education and democracy will erode our society deeper into a hole by themselves.
I'm rather fearful for the future of education in this current climate. The tools are already powerful enough to wreak havoc and they haven't stopped growing yet! I don't think we'll properly know the effect for some years now, not until the kids that are currently in 5th, 6th, or 7th start going into the workforce. While the individual optimist in me would like to see AI as this great equalizer, personal tutor for everyone, equal opportunity deliverance, I think we've fumbled it for all but a select few. Certainly there will be cases of great success, students who leverage AI to it's fullest extent. But I urge one to think of the other side of the pie. How will that student respond to this? And how many students are really in this section?
AI in its current state presents a pact with the devil for all but the most disciplined and passionate of us. It makes it far to easy to resign all use of your critical mental faculties, and to stagnate in your various abilities to navigate our complex modern world. Skills such as critical reading, synthesizing, and writing are just a few of the most notable examples. Unrestrained use of tools that help us so immensely in these categories can bring nothing but slow demise for us in the end.
This thought pattern pairs nicely with the discussion of AIs effects on democracy. Hopefully the step taken from assuming the aforementioned society, with its rampant inabilities to reason critically about its surroundings, to saying that this is categorically bad for democracy, isn't too large. Democracy, an imperfect form of government that is the best we have at this moment, only works well with an educated populace. An uneducated democracy governs on borrowed time. One can already see the paint start to peel (there is a larger effect that the Internet has on democracy that I'll leave out of this for now, but is worth thinking about as it's the one responsible for the current decline in our political reality).
The unfortunate conclusion that I reach when I think of all of this, is that it comes down to the ability of government and corporations to properly restrain this technology and foster its growth in a manner that is beneficial for society. And that restraint is hard to see coming with our current set up. This is to avoid being overly dramatic and saying that it's impossible.
If you look at the history of the United States, and truly observe the death grip that its baby, capitalism, has on its governance, if you look at this, you find it hard to believe that this time will be any different from times past. There is far too much money and national security concern at stake here to do anything but put the pedal to the floor and rapidly build an empire in this wild west of AI. The unfortunate conclusion is that perhaps this could have been a wonderful tool for humanity, and allowed us to realize our collective dreams, but due to the reasons stated above I believe this is unachievable with our current set up of governance and understanding of ethics, globally.
> There’s a non-zero chance that AI is one of the most destructive creations in human history
Geoffrey Hinton was interviewed by Sajid Javid on BBC R4 on Friday [1] and was considerable more pessimistic. If I hear it correctly he reckoned that there is a 10% to 30% chance that AI wipes us out within the next 30 years.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0kbsg05
So you worked there 10 years, made your stack of cash, and then had a moral reckoning? So brave.
Not ideal I guess but better than no reckoning at all.
Have you been offered a job in a BigTech that pays 3 times your current salary, and did you decline it?
It's easy to criticise others when you are not confronted to the situation.
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I specifically said I don’t judge others for working there now and just wanted to add to the conversation by explaining how my thoughts changed over time. I do not think I was or am brave for any of my career decisions.
I was 20 when I started working in big tech and the reputation of those companies was at its absolute peak. I had a lot to learn.
From the article:
> But I have yet, until now, to point at the elephant in the room and ask whether it is ethical to work for Big Tech, taking all of the above into consideration.
People often highlight "boycotting" as the most effective action an individual can take to drive change, but for those who work in tech, the most powerful message you can send is denying your labor.
To me, this isn’t even about whether "Big Tech" companies are ethical; it’s a matter of ideological principle. FAANG companies already wield far too much power, and I refuse to contribute to that imbalance.
> denying your labor.
that's still boycotting. but it needs to be active rather than passive to send a message. not applying for work is not enough, you have to decline at offer stage on stated principles. i dont think most would go through that effort.
only the highest level individuals who Big Tech tries to poach can do this without much time invesment because they effectively have offers at first contact.
I don't think anyone is obligated to go through the entire interview process just so they can decline the offer.
Yes, you'd waste a few hours of some expensive engineers' time, and more hours of relatively cheap recruiter time - but sending the recruiter a big ol' fuck you on first contact gets the message across just fine.
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I don't think any of these things ultimately work. There will always be someone who will take the money or the deal. Advocating for regulation is the most effective way forward. But probably the first thing to advocate for is some notion of "equal speech," not just "free speech," otherwise it will be very hard to get any new regulation passed.
By equal speech I mean that people should have equal opportunity to be heard and pitch ideas when it comes to political advocacy. If the rich can send a million messages for every one of yours, no one will ever hear or listen to you.
> There will always be someone who will take the money or the deal.
And even if there wasn't, that'd give them even MORE ammo to go screaming for easier access to H-1B and similar such imported labor.
I agree. This is what I have been doing:
- Respond with a template explaining why I don't want to work for Google|Amazon|Meta|Microsoft|Apple
- Include information of some tech unions the recruiter could join and give reasons to do so
- Talk to colleagues about concerns and what can we do to mitigate current power imbalances
- Talk to family and friends about the industry, its impact on society, and provide help if they would like to try alternative technologies
Wouldnt it be even more effective to take a job there and provide them half assed labor?
I would consider that unethical, and would not do it.
For many reasons, I live a life of extremely rigorous personal ethics.
I don’t insist that others do the same, but I do need to protect myself from others that assume my ethical stance to be weakness.
For example; I make it a point to always keep my word.
Unethical folks that know this of me, are constantly trying to get me to make commitments, without divulging the costs to me, or the boundaries of said commitments.
It’s my responsibility to make sure that I have full disclosure, before making a commitment.
Many people become quite jaded and misanthropic, when faced with this. I tend to find it amusing, watching people try weaseling out of giving full information. Often, these efforts tell me more about things, than full disclosure up front will.
I like people, and can call some really rapacious bastards friend. My ethical stance is truly entirely personal, and I have worked closely, with some spectacularly flawed people.
Scott Adams (He Whose Name Has Been Struck From The Lists) wrote an extremely cynical book, called The Way of the Weasel, which is downright prescient.
No.
How do you think we got here?
Turns out network effect can compensate for a lot of incompetence and lethargy. Many (most?) big tech engineers are likely already cruising.
Try do something you actually believe is good instead of coping by telling yourself you are intentionally failing to do something bad.
-100x engineer. straight from the field CIA manual for sabotage PDF.
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Not only do I disagree with the premise, but I think the article is poorly argued.
Was working on the Manhattan project unethical because it furnished the ability for us to kill humans on an even more vast industrial scale than we previously could have imagined? Perhaps, but it's hard to square this with the reality that the capability of mutually assured destruction has ushered in the longest period of relative peace and global stability in recorded history, during a period of time we might otherwise expect dramatically increased conflict and strife (because we are sharing our limited planet with an additional order of magnitude of humans). Had everyone at Los Alamos boycotted the effort, would we be in a better place when some other power inevitably invented the atomic bomb? Somehow I doubt it.
The world is a complex system. While there are hopefully an expanding set of core "values" that we collectively believe in, any single person is going to be challenged by conflicting values at times. This is like the Kagan stages of psychological development [1], but societally. I can believe that it's net bad for society that someone is working on a cigarette manufacturing line, without personally holding them accountable for the ills that are downstream of their work. There are competing systems (family, society) that place competing values (good - we can afford to live, bad - other people get sick and die) on the exact same work.
If people want to boycott some types of work, more power to them, but I don't think the line between "ethical" and "unethical" tasks is so clear that you can put whole corporations on one side or another of that line.
Sometimes I try and put a dollar amount on how much value I have received from Google in my lifetime. I've used their products for at least 20 years. Tens of thousands of dollars seems like an accurate estimate. I'm happy to recognize that two things are true: that there are societal problems with some big tech businesses that we would collectively benefit from solving AND that I (and millions of other people less fortunate than me, that couldn't "afford" the non-ad-supported cost of these services) have benefited tremendously from the existence of Google and its ilk.
[1]: https://imgur.com/a/LSkzutj
> Was working on the Manhattan project unethical because it furnished the ability for us to kill humans on an even more vast industrial scale than we previously could have imagined? Perhaps, but it's hard to square this with the reality that the capability of mutually assured destruction has ushered in the longest period of relative peace and global stability in recorded history
Ah, consequentialist versus deontological ethics: neither camp can even hear the other. Some people just pattern-match making thing X (weapons, profits, patents, non-free software, whatever) against individual behavior and condemn individuals doing these things regardless of the actual effects on the real world. Sure, invading Japan instead of bombing it would have killed a million Americans and who knows how many Japanese (real WW2 allied estimate), but ATOM BOMB BAD and PEOPLE WHO DO BAD, and so we get people who treat Los Alamos as some kind of moral black hole.
The world makes sense only when we judge actions by their consequences. The strident and brittle deontological rules that writers of articles that feature the wor d"ethics" in the headline invariably promote are poor approximations of the behaviors that lead to good consequences in the world.
> invading Japan instead of bombing it would have killed a million Americans and who knows how many Japanese (real WW2 allied estimate),
Most people who believe that nuclear strikes on Japan were morally wrong also believe that Japan would have surrendered regardless, and nukes were thus redundant (and hence, wrong).
If you studied this question, you should know that there's a compelling argument that Japanese were motivated just as much if not more by Soviets entering the fray with considerable success. Now, you may personally disagree with this assessment, but surely you can at least recognize that others can legitimately hold this opinion and base their ethical calculus on it?
> The world makes sense only when we judge actions by their consequences.
I'm not sure I agree with this part. To quote Gene Wolfe: "until we reach the end of time we don’t know whether something is good or bad, we can only judge the intentions of those who acted." Judging morals by outcome seems like a tricky path down a slippery slope. The Manhattan Project is morally complicated, both because the intentions of those involved was complicated, and because the outcome was complicated. What's wrong to do, I think, is simplifying it down to "was good" or "was bad".
I don’t really understand the categories you’ve set up or the traditions you’re referring to, but it seems like consequentialist ethics would be good as a historical exercise, but not much else. Because we mostly don’t know what will happen when we act, at least not with the clarity that that kind of analysis would need. I think the implicit ethical problem here is that there’s not much any individual can do that will have a measurable effect when it comes to entities as large and powerful as big tech (or any other industry). So then how do you think about making ethical decisions?
> that I (and millions of other people less fortunate than me, that couldn't "afford" the non-ad-supported cost of these services) have benefited tremendously from the existence of Google and its ilk.
People who were into Google seem to tremendously overestimate the value it provided.
The only Google thing I ever used is Android, and only because it's too hard to avoid it.
Had there not been Google you'd have used alternative services, and your life would not have been much worse.
Yes, a similarly good search engine would have emerged, similar products would have been devised, and the internet would have been ad-supported as it already was before Google.
I used Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, etc in the era before Google - and it was worse.
If you're suggesting that some other company besides Google would have worked out the same algorithms and business plan, then this seems incoherent. Even if true, we'd be here discussing how much value we've gotten from Notgoogle. It's still a tremendous amount of value, whatever the company is named.
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How do I reason ethically about this?
I am a security professional. My work directly affects the security of the systems I am responsible for. If I do my job well, people’s data is less likely to be stolen, leaked, intentionally corrupted, or held for ransom. I also influence privacy related decisions.
I work for a Mag7 company. The company has many divisions; the division I work for doesn’t seem to be doing anything that I would perceive as unethical, but other divisions of my company do behave in a way I consider unethical.
I’m not afraid to take an ethical stance; in a previous job at another company I have directly confronted my management chain about questionable behavior and threatened to quit (I ended up convincing them my position was correct).
So how do I reason about that? Really the sticking point is that large companies are not monoliths. Am I acting unethically for working for an ethical division of an imperfect company?
There are many ways to reason ethically about your situation, and you could start by using historical philosophers as inspiration.
Bentham might apply if you consider the overall outcome: is the work your company does positive or ethical for the majority of people the majority of the time? It seems like the “greatest good for the greatest number” would allow for some small unethical aspects so long as the outcome is good for the majority. This could also be seen as a shortcoming in that philosophy because it justifies some pretty terrible actions for the greater good (some of which, like the Manhattan project and its outcome, are mentioned elsewhere in this thread).
Kant might make you look at your company and imagine that all companies acted that way as a way to reason ethically. If all companies acted the way your company acts would that be good or bad for humanity? Kind of like the golden rule, but more rational.
There are many more to consider but it’s my view that most of them will get you to the point where you probably shouldn’t work for an unethical company, even if your particular work or area of focus is perfectly ethical. Mainly because you working for the company allows or helps it to exist in some way, and we don’t want unethical companies to exist. So maybe you could reason your way into working there if your sole focus was finding a way to destroy the company somehow. Otherwise it’s probably better to work elsewhere.
Thank you!
As an aside, I consider anything that actively subverts the company, beyond whistleblowing, as unethical, and in fact, it’s a threat that people like me have to defend against, so I would never involve myself in such activities.
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I don't have an answer to your question, but I can give a method that usually helps me think about these things.
I try to find theoretical situations that I find easier to think about, and hence easier to judge on a moral level. Usually I construct these situations by going to extremes with certain variables. What if your company had one employee? What if all of humanity was its workforce?
For example, let's say your employer just employs you, and your job is to press a button every month that kills a random person and generates 30k dollars. That's a situation where I personally find it very easy to make a moral judgement.
Then, in very small increments, try and change this theoretical situation to more closely resemble the real thing. Maybe there's some context missing, maybe one of the variables is too extreme. And with each increment, try to pass judgement.
For example, you can change the kill button so that maybe the button has some positive effect (maybe it kills someone, but also cures two terminal cancer patients). Or maybe you want to increase the number of employees and see how that makes you feel.
It's not a silver bullet, but there's a chance that pursuing this mode of thought ends up enabling you to confidently assess your personal situation in morality. It's also not necessarily easy. It can be difficult to find the right starting point (there's more than one!), or the right incremental change (there's more than one!). I hope it may be of help.
For an example of this way of thinking you could look up Peter Singer's argument for charity, or the pro stem cell research argument which asks you to choose between saving little girl or a box of embryos from a burning building (I forget the origin).
An ethical absolutist would say "yes." But you might guess such a person is not very popular, as there is almost no aspect of simply being alive that could be considered ethical.
I dunno. I’m kind of with the sentiment in his original column, or at least how he paraphrased it. I think it’s naive to believe that you can bring about any real change in tech through moral suasion alone. The monetary payoffs are too large and there are too many people who will work for them no matter what. If you want to change some behavior that you find immoral, your best bet is to organize politically and pass laws.
> there are too many people who will work for them no matter what
BigTech was already struggling to hire the caliber of engineers they needed when I worked there (and I left 5 years ago), and a fair number of the best candidates were refusing on ethical grounds (in that era, mostly around Cambridge Analytic and Facebook's involvement in Myanmar, but also due to concerns about blatant marketing to teens).
I don't think it's a given that these companies can maintain a staff of thousands of top-tier engineers as they sink themselves ever deeper into the various ethical quagmires.
I think you totally misunderstand what he is saying.
You can’t make people do things with ethics. That’s not what ethics is for, and that’s not what he is talking about.
'Never attribute to ethics that which can be explained by incentives' - Hanlon's Hammer
'Show me an organization's stupidity and I'll show you their malice' - Munger's Psychology of Human Misquotations
> But the belief in the magical power of the free market always to serve the public good has no theoretical basis.f In fact, our current climate crisis is a demonstrated market failure.
It's not a free market failure. It's an example of the Tragedy of the Commons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
I think that’s like saying a square is not a rectangle.
The Tragedy of the Commons is characteristic of Marxist economies, not free markets.
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It’s both.
The Commons is not owned by anyone, and so property rights are not in play. Property rights are essential to the proper functioning of the free market.
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Technology scales lots of things. Including business models based on conflict of interest.
There were corporate conflicts of interest with respect to customers long before technology. But it took tech to create a community scrapbook, tied to a mass surveillance, psychology hacking and coercion flywheel, powered by hundreds of billions of dollars from third parties, and motivated by trillions of dollars of potential market cap.
Something has to give. Society is eventually going to have to come to terms with the fact that minor incidents of poor behavior, when scaled up with technology, can significantly degrade society.
Many things are illegal now, that in the far past would never have been considered a problem. Scale matters. And Internet tech scales.
Thank you! Great to see this message getting a bit of a platform.
As industry practicioners, we have the agency to force positive change in our field. If the government is too encumbered and the executives are too avaricious, that leaves us. If you want tech to do good things for people, work for a company that makes tech that does good things for people.
One ethical thing that some people on HN do, and more should: criticize big companies when they do something unethical, even if you'd want to work for them.
Yes, presumably, you will get on some company-wide hiring denylists. (Not because you're prominent, but because there will be routine LLM-powered "corporate fit" checks, against massive corpora and streams of ongoing surveillance capitalism monitoring of most things being said.)
Some things need to be said. And people need to not just hear it once, and forget it, but to hear it from many people, on an ongoing basis. So not saying it is being complicit.
> We must balance optimizing for oneself with optimizing for others, including the public good. So how does working for Big Tech thread this needle? This is the question that people who work for Big Tech must ask themselves.
This is a bullshit premise. Many people who worked at Google when I was there (including myself) sincerely believed that Google was good for society.
People sitting on the outside have an incorrect mental model of how people work at companies like this.
A very very small minority work there and think the company is evil. The ones who think that do not last long because it’s insufferable working with people drinking different koolaid. The same thing is true for working for Wall Street, defense contractors, drug companies, and whatever else you can think of.
If it’s a company that defines and leads the space, it’s likely filled with motivated employees that already think the company is doing the right thing.
So there is no ethical quandary of “what is good for me vs what is good for society” because the employee thinks he/she is doing good for society by working there.
> Uber skirted regulations, shrugged off safety issues, and presided over a workplace rife with sexual harassment.” Was it ethical to have worked at Uber under Kalanick?
This is the false dichotomy that doesn’t apply to people who drink the koolaid. If you think Uber has saved thousands of lives via reduced drunk driving and available rides out of bad areas, disrupting/ignoring local regulations is easy to justify. A leader who had sexual harassment issues is completely irrelevant because of “the mission”.
Implying that someone is unethical to be at Uber while that was going on makes as much sense as implying someone is unethical for being a research professor at Harvard when others there have published fraudulent papers at the same time.
> A very very small minority work there and think the company is evil.
I think that for every true believer in the "mission" of the company, there are two or three employees who choose not to closely scrutinize the ethics of the company's actions, because they are paid extraordinarily well.
I don't think my company is evil per se, but I do think that if we were optimizing for the good of humanity, rather than profit, our products would look rather different.
Regarding his ask that ACM dedicate itself to the public good, the IEEE is already there in its code of ethics.
> hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, to strive to comply with ethical design and sustainable development practices, to protect the privacy of others, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment
That code is pretty squarely at odds with big tech's latest malevolent aims.
> the belief in the magical power of the free market always to serve the public good has no theoretical basis
This needs to be repeated more often.
Early on, there was this idea that free market capitalism was inherently amoral, and we had to do things like "vote with your wallet" to enforce some kind of morality on the system. This has been gradually replaced with a pseudo-religious idea that there's some inherent "virtue" to capitalism. You just need to have faith in the system, and everything will magically work itself out.
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You cant have an ethical crisis if you dont have any morality. Do what thou wilt is our only modern ethos.
It's good to see someone have the humility to lay out their strong previous position and then renounce it in plain language. So much public communication these days consists of hedging, back-pedaling, and other forms of strategic disavowal.
I really like Timothy Snyder's take on this.
Breakthroughs in information technology always cause disruption in the political meaning (wars and chaos). It was like that when writing was invented (making big organized religions possible), it was the same with printing press (allowing reformation and big political movements), it was similar with radio (which allowed 20-th century style totalitarian regimes).
Each time the legacy powers struggled to survive and wars started. It took some time for the societies to adapt and regulate the new technologies and create a new stable equilibrium.
It's not surprising that it's the same with internet. We have unstable wild-west style information oligarchy forming before our eyes. The moguls build continent-spanning empires. There's no regulation, the costs are negligible, and the only ones trying to control it are the authoritarians. And the new oligarchs are obviously fighting with their thought-control powers against the regulation with all they've got.
It won't end without fireworks.
I didn't think the Cambridge Analytica scandal had anything at all to do with computer science. I thought it had to do with business and hence business ethics.
I work on software for managing casinos. I feel morally superior. Big tech has real problems if working with gambling and weaponry is preferable to big tech.
How do you feel morally superior? Casinos are built to only extract money from people - they provide minimal value.
I wonder why it is often the case that people talking about ethics are the ones that looks like the least competent or decent to do so.
> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,”
This says it all.
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
I'm going to have to add that my list of favorite aphorisms. And it's not just salaries that drive this dynamic. It is difficult to get someone to understand something when their entire identity is invested in not understanding it. This applies to religions, political ideologies, and even to a lot of self-styled rationalism.
"But in my January 2019 Communications column,^b I dismissed the ethical-crisis vibe. I wrote, "If society finds the surveillance business model offensive, then the remedy is public policy, in the form of laws and regulations, rather than an ethics outrage." I now think, however, I was wrong."
The "ethics crisis", as described here, is the complaining of one ruling elite (traditional media, universities, bureaucrats, etc.) against another upcoming elite (tech). The problem is that all of the power is accruing to tech — at the expense of the competing, traditional elites.
An even bigger problem is that most of the economic and social benefits have come from technology. This even includes shorter work weeks and paid leave (typically falsely credited to unions) and greater disposable income, which have come from technology (broadly speaking) and not from activism.
A tech "ethics crisis" and the "dangerous" profit motive are just renewed attacks against capitalism, and "tech" is itself just the tip of the spear of capitalism (and the cultural nom de guerre of capitalism's elites).
Big Tech subverted the world’s longest running democracy and tipped a majority of the global population into authoritarian rule. An essay handwringing the question doesn’t seem very useful at this point.
Is that why people overwhelmingly voted for change in 2024, ironically to bring back the “dictator”? Popular mandate, all of swing states, majority of governorships, house and the senate - seems as decisive a democratic choice as it can get!
It was a narrow victory. Trump didn’t win a majority, and his win had little effect on down ballot races.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-size-of-donald-tru...
> Trump's 2024 raw vote margin was smaller than any popular vote winner since 2000, and the fifth-lowest since 1960
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Trump got lucky a bit with the immigration issue. There are 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the US. The barriers to removal that existed 15 years ago are mostly gone. Everyone is so connected now, finding illegals is straightforward data mining. The government data shows there is really no explanation why they aren't being removed. Even Obama deported huge numbers of illegals. It also didn't help that in exit polls Harris received less than 40% of the vote of married men and less than 40% of the vote of people identifying as Christian. I would say people voted for deportations and someone more old fashioned.
FWIW, Putin was also overwhelmingly elected by people "voting for change" back in the day.
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The govt was changed despite big tech not because of it. And the majority of people disagree with your characterization of "authoritarian rule".
Trump didn’t win a majority of those who voted, let alone the idea that a majority of the country supports him.
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In light of these contexts, what would you rather see at the top of HN?
> Is Big Tech supporting the public good, and if not, what should Big Tech workers do about it?
The problem is not if Big Tech does support or does not support something. The problem is they have any opinion at all! The pitch is they are "platforms" and "arbiters" who decide like highest court. They should not have any opinions at all!
All this oligopoly needs to be dissolved!
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> In fact, our current climate crisis is a demonstrated market failure.
This wrong on so many levels. There is neither a climate crisis nor a market failure. If any, central economies exhibited (and exhibit) higher levels of pollution and destruction of public good.
Mindless repetition of the climate crisis trope has done more damage to the cause than carbon emissions.
So, there’s no climate crisis, and also it’s caused by “central economies”? (I don’t know what those are, but they sound bad.)
You understand “if any”?
> There is neither a climate crisis…
There is also an education crisis apparently.
I agree with the author that questions of ethics are social optimization problems.
> We must balance optimizing for oneself with optimizing for others
Yet if each person would optimize for themself, then the balancing is automatically taken care of. The invisible hand is even more free and dexterous on the social scale than the economic.
> the belief in the magical power of the free market always to serve the public good has no theoretical basis. In fact, our current climate crisis is a demonstrated market failure.
The power of the free market is at least as theoretically and empirically sound as the climate crisis.
I think this is naive, because a flaw of such free market thinking is its failure to price in externalities. That’s what the relationship with the climate crisis link was about.
How is the environment, which is directly of concern to the primary economic sector, and to the entire economic enterprise in the long run, an externality?
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The problem with optimising exclusively for oneself is that you definitionally optimise at the expense of others. Gaps are easily widened, and your balancing idea falls apart when the scales are tipped from the start.
It is not as simple as "my profit" vs. "others' expense". The elegance of the invisible hand theory is that it also accounts for the cases where others' expense is my expense and others' benefit is my benefit just as well as the others.
The scales sure can be tipped on the individual level, but you are only considering the "one individual vs. one individual" case. Many cliques of extreme power have been taken down by the weaker majority, which is also one of the processes contributing to the collapse of monopolies.
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The person is arguing whether it is good or bad to work for Big Tech. I wouldn't hate the players when you really should hate the game. Most of the populace is largely unaware of surveillance or why they are using products that have a negative influence. Stopping to work for Big Tech does not change this lack of education. Advocating that privacy should be respected or even supporting laws that would regulate large technology companies has been attempted to be implemented by the ACLU and EFF, but it isn’t really practical when you can hire lobbyists for around $1 million dollars, which you can use to get passed nearly anything you want. Also, Big Tech may need fewer people to achieve its goals, so I think this post is too little and too late.
> Also, Big Tech may need fewer people to achieve its goals
Someone has drunk the ChatGPT-will-replace-$500,000-engineers koolaid, I see
And he doesn't even get around to mentioning that Google (and Amazon) are providing AI computing to Israel even though Google's own lawyer warned that they could be used to violate human rights. Their lawyers wrote: "Google Cloud services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations, including Israeli activity in the West Bank.”
It gets worse, they got advice and then didn't follow it:
"Google reportedly sought input from consultants including the firm Business for Social Responsibility (BSR). Consultants apparently recommended that the contract bar the sale and use of its AI tools to the Israeli military 'and other sensitive customers,' the report says. Ultimately, the [Google] contract reportedly didn’t reflect those recommendations."
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24311951/google-project-n...
The end result is Lavender which HRW details here: https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/10/questions-and-answers-is...