Comment by mplanchard

Wonderfully put, thank you. Ultimately, we’re supposed to be “engineers,” and that means (for our jobs) assessing tools and practices in terms of their net benefit on the products we create: there is no free lunch, and a thing’s downside is often proportional to its upside, so it seems wise to approach these things with caution and to have the kind of nuanced discussions that you note have been lacking.

I’d also hope, though, that as humans, we can recognize that tools do not exist in a vacuum, and that their effect on ourselves and society at large can be net negative even if they have a net positive effect on our work (whether due to something fundamental to the tool or due to the way it is being applied at scale). We can’t responsibly leave these discussions out of our analysis of the tool itself and its fitness for purpose, because we are members of society, and our adoption/use of the tool helps to determine that societal impact.