[toohotatopic]

How about a Hippocratic Oath for business leaders? This is shifting the responsibility from management towards the engineers. It's not the engineers who pulled the trigger at Facebook - or Microsoft. They build the weapons. Management fires them.

This is a hypocritic ode. If somebody is acting unethically at MS then it is management. All the innovation that is not happening because MS is abusing their position. Two times they have killed a universal software platform to preserve theirs: Java and websites. Ironically they are pushing websites now that the platform has shifted to mobile with objective c and Google's variation of Java.

>According to Brad Smith, just like it is the Pope’s job to bring religion closer to today’s technology, it is the software developer’s job to bring technology closer to the humanities.

The Pope is to religion as is the President of the biggest software company to software development. It is his responsibility, not theirs. Or does he see himself as that software developer? I guess it is more a Balmer developer and he means software engineers.

He could start by handing out software licenses / EULAS that take full responsibility for any damage the software does cause, like any other sold product has to do. Then, by business processes, management will take care of the ethical issues to minimize risks.

[delhanty]

Why isn't this the top comment?

Microsoft executives seem more in need of lessons in ethics than their engineers. Just one example from last year:

>'We did not sign up to develop weapons' say Microsoft employees protesting $479 million HoloLens army contract

https://www.pcgamer.com/we-did-not-sign-up-to-develop-weapon...

>They build the weapons

Talking of weapons, while we speculate about what AI might be used for, Microsoft executives have literally decided to build actual weapons.

[Diesel555]

Building weapons is immoral? Tell that to the WW2 industrial complex that supported the war.

Not building weapons for the war effort is not always right. That is an intentional double negative because I think it's the most clear if you read it twice. Building weapons for the war effort is sometimes right would be the boolean negative of that statement.

>Microsoft executives have literally decided to build actual weapons.

Yep. Literally they did. Clearly all US weapons are evil in your opinion because you disagree with all US weapon usage I'm guessing? You have to combine the argument that they are literally making weapons with the fact that those weapons are being used in a way you don't agree with.

Keep in mind that most of these advanced weapons they are literally making are not designed against the current wars you most likely disagree with. They are built, to include AI, to keep pace with advanced threats from other countries. Allowing us to fall behind technologically, due to perceived moral black/white issues of current wars, could lead to a whole new world in 40 years as you make your arguments in a well protected environment. Not researching advanced topics will lead to an asymmetric fight... not in our favor... if the enemy so chooses.

Reference our usage of nuclear weapons. If you think that was evil, then you wouldn't want an evil country / group of people to gain such an asymmetric advantage. If you think it was necessary, then you want to have an asymmetric advantage when it is necessary against an evil group. Yes I recognize the inherent cyclical issue with the above statement. Either way, allowing all people to gain an asymmetric advantage while we just discard all research in hopes that others will follow is ignorant of history - war theory is a thing.

[ergodicity001]

Crocodile tears, and a lot of cheap virtue signaling.

I have some friends who have worked at MSFT for a long time, about 20 years or so. There was a time when they used to talk about open source as if it was cancer (~2011). When MSFT started embracing the cancer, they didn't really up and leave. Now they are all talking about how great this open source thing is.

But even funnier was when they used to complain about Google's rampant user tracking. And then one day they added targeted ads into Windows 10. Did these people suddenly decide "enough is enough" and go and join the EFF? You already know the answer to that.

[shp0ngle]

The website is called "capital and growth" so of course they won't advocate for business leaders being actually responsible for anything.

[sfvisser]

If you’re in management at an engineering dept/co and make decisions about what is going to be engineered and how that’s going to be deployed you are in engineering yourself and should obviously take the oath yourself.

Not saying I’m in favor of this oath, just that it seems silly to distinguish different roles in the engineering process.

[munchbunny]

I don't think the exercise of drawing the line between "engineering" and "not engineering" is a useful one here. The actual decisions and the pressure to perform for the job crosses disciplines up at the top of the management hierarchy.

The broader point is that in most companies engineering decisions don't come purely from the engineering department. They are often decisions made as part of bigger projects or efforts. For example, it's probably not up to engineers in most companies whether the any of the tech giants sell to the military. If it is, it's up to people who were engineers at some point and might still exist up at the top of the "product" part of the company, but who for all intents and purposes stopped writing any code or even managing anyone who writes code a long, long time ago.

[austincheney]

Its already a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act