Comment by Gimpei
21 days ago
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.