Comment by socialcommenter
6 days ago
This argument has the same obvious flaws as the anti-mask/anti-vax movement (which unfortunately means there will always be a fringe that don't care). These things are allowed to interact with the outside world, it's not as simple as "users can blow their own system up, it's their responsibility".
I don't need to think hard to speculate on what might go wrong here - will it answer spam emails sincerely? Start cancelling flights for you by accident? Send nuisance emails to notable software developers for their contribution to society[1]? Start opening unsolicited PRs on matplotlib?
We really needed to have made software engineering into a real, licensed engineering practice over a decade ago. You wanna write code that others will use? You need to be held to a binding set of ethical standards.
Even though it means I probably wouldn't have a job, I think about this a lot and agree that it should. Nowadays suggesting programmers should be highly knowledgeable at what they do will get you called a gatekeeper.
While it is literally gatekeeping, it's necessary. Doctors, architects, lawyers should be gatekept.
I used to work on industrial lifting crane simulation software. People used it to plan out how to perform big lift jobs to make sure they were safe. Literal, "if we fuck this up, people could die" levels of responsibility. All the qualification I had was my BS in CS and two years of experience. It was lucky circumstance that I was actually quiet good at math and physics to be able to discover that there were major errors in the physics model.
Not every programmer is going to encounter issues like that, but also, neither can we predict where things will end up. Not every lawyer is going to be a criminal defense lawyer. Not every doctor is going to be a brain surgeon. Not every architect is going to design skyscrapers. But they all do work that needs to be warranteed in some way.
We're already seeing people getting killed because of AI. Brian in middle management "getting to code again" is not a good enough reason.
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At least during the Covid response, your concerns over anti-mask and anti-vaccine issues seem unwarranted.
The claims being shared by officials at the time was that anyone vaccinated was immune and couldn't catch it. Claims were similarly made that we needed roughly 60% vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. With that precedent being set it shouldn't matter whether one person chose not to mask up or get the jab, most everyone else could do so to fully protect themselves and those who can't would only be at risk if more than 40% of the population weren't onboard with the masking and vaccination protocols.
> that anyone vaccinated was immune and couldn't catch it.
Those claims disappeared rapidly when it became clear they offered some protection, and reduced severity, but not immunity.
People seem to be taking a lot more “lessons” from COVID than are realistic or beneficial. Nobody could get everything right. There couldn’t possibly be clear “right” answers, because nobody knew for sure how serious the disease could become as it propagated, evolved, and responded to mitigations. Converging on consistent shared viewpoints, coordinating responses, and working through various solutions to a new threat on that scale was just going to be a mess.
Those claims were made after the studies were done over a short duration and specifically only watching for subjects who reported symptoms.
I'm in no way taking a side here on whether anyone should have chosen to get vaccinated or wear masks, only that the information at the time being pushed out from experts doesn't align with an after the fact condemnation of anyone who chose not to.
I specifically wasn't referring to that instance (if anything I'm thinking more of the recent increase in measles outbreaks), I myself don't hold a strong view on COVID vaccinations. The trade-offs, and herd immunity thresholds, are different for different diseases.
Do we know that 0.1% prevalence of "unvaccinated" AI agents won't already be terrible?
Fair enough. I assumed you had Covid in mind with an anti-mask reference. At least in modern history in the US, we have only even considered masks during the Covid response.
I may be out of touch, but I haven't heard about masks for measles, though it does spread through aerosol droplets so that would be a reasonable recommendation.
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