[onceKnowable]

No, yeah sorry, I’m obviously being super brief here to just get the point across without writing a thesis on my phone :)

Although, predictably enough, I followed up with more thesis length posts to clarify my point! Namedropping einstein too, who do I think I’m impressing? (But Einstein is relevant to this debate, although he made the crucial mistake of only informing the government and not informing the public. Obviously this was well-intentioned on his part and not malicious at all but it’s a lesson that every developer of new innovations needs to take onboard.)

This isn’t about specifically demonizing “engineers” or innovation. Or even to do with liability where “that engineer developed a car that murdered someone”. Liability laws are robust enough to figure out whether the gas pedal was functioning correctly, the driver is at fault, or if not, the engineer (or rather, the company he works for) is at fault.

This debate is about broader strokes: should developers of new technologies be ethically bound to inform both politicians & the public about their innovations, specifically so that, after a public debate on the potential negative consequences of that technology, the public can then demand their politicians to produce robust laws protecting the public from misuse of those technologies. (I say yes, I know it’s tough because I love just developing cool new shit too, but we developers have got to take a step back and realize the future implications of what we make. Data gathering, manipulation and retention is a ticking time bomb. And who knows what’s next.)

Another example is facial recognition, it’s depressingly funny to see experts who know so much about the technology proclaim it to be no big deal without understanding the ramifications of living in a society where your every movement is tracked and potentially monitored. That is a literal police state, and the US constitution has amendments made hundreds of years ago specifically to outlaw such actions to protect the public at large, both from private companies tracking their movements and to protect the public from the government itself. To have all of that progress in the name of “facial recognition will be awesome because you can login to your phone quicker” is not a good move because once that technology is in the wild, until laws catch up to robustly protect the public, who knows what will be done to the public at large with that technology. Ditto for “who cares about data retention and website tracking, it makes marketing so much easier!” and “don’t worry about your DNA being stored and sold by ancestry sites indefinitely because it’s so cool to know that you’ve got a 7th cousin living on a different continent”.