Google Docs & Apple’s ICloud both have cloud based excel sheet equivalents that can allow multiple people to edit simultaneously and also track who made what changes.
If you did this with git, it’d have to be text based so a CSV textile that could be exported to an excel doc whenever needed, would be the closest you could get. Good luck teaching your team how to use the command line though :)
You might be better to redirect your effort into lobbying your boss to use software that’s actually designed for project management such as Trello?
Only if the whole population succumbs to ignorance. Not saying that doesn’t happen, especially in light of stuff like net neutrality and the NSA et al’s data gathering.
But on the whole, the general public will drown out cranks who shout about imagines threats like fluoride or vaccines. The science on both is clear.
Likewise, I’m optimistic that the negative realities of net neutrality stifling startups and the mass data-gathering will become so apparent to future generations of lawmakers & voters that they’ll be reversed in due course.
^TFW the app they busted their ass developing needs to be totally rebranded and relaunched because they forgot to check if their chosen wordmark was already used!
That attitude is what turns non-nerds away from asking our opinion on the technologies that we develop.
If you don’t want to be involved in the debates about AI, automation et al, then you can’t really comment on those who do. If you do want to chip in, inform the public about the realistic dangers. What they need is realistic information from experts so that they can deduce what risks are acceptable and what risks are unacceptable.
Even the most untechnically-informed member of the public will get the positives: AI, automation, (or whatever technology you’re developing) makes software better in someway, doesn’t even matter how or why, it’s taken for granted that you’re developing something that you believe will be a net-positive.
But it’s the negatives that are what needs to be legislated for. Regulations and laws don’t give technologies a pat on the back, they protect the public from misuse of a technology. Your voice would be welcomed.
That’s why informed public debate is not about adding warning stickers to things, it’s about creating competent laws that robustly protect the public.
In your example, the result shouldn’t be warning stickers, it’s laws specifically against building guns with your 3D printer. Or if right to weapons happens to be enshrined in your constitution, it’s aboyt legal liability protocols being amended to take into account the fact that a perpetrator used a weapon that they built in their 3D printer as opposed to a regularly procured weapon.
Hold on, you’re ascribing a lack of dystopias because you don’t see one right now. That’s because laws have been passed to restrict that possibility. The public debate has been conducted on a lot of technologies that could have lead us to a dystopia yet you’re ignoring them totally because dystopia never materialized?
- police state actions and encouragement: entirely possible, especially now that we’ve all got location trackers that also contain our innermost thoughts in the form of our text messages, yet using all of that info against us is totally illegal.
- subliminal messaging & propaganda: never more possible than right now with our totally connected lifestyles, yet totally illegal.
And on and on. Just because the worst hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it wouldnt happen if left unchecked.
Also, Nobel thought he’d created the most explosive substance that would ever be possible, with hindsight we know that TNT wasn’t that but nukes absolutely are; and his conclusion was correct in the context that nukes are the next step up from TNT: with such powerful weapons, battlefield wars between those who hold nukes have effectively ended. (Proxy wars notwithstanding, if those countries had nukes they wouldn’t be used as pawns in a proxy war.)
A council, no matter how large, is, relative to the general public as a whole, made up of a small number of individuals.
Such a council would raise so many ethical concerns, such as: Who are these individuals? Why are they on the council? What are their biases? What does their livelihoods ultimately depend on? What conflicts of interest do they have? Among hundreds of other questions.
Only an informed debate among the general public can lead to laws that robustly protect the public at large because vested interests get drowned out by informed dissent from other, equally-qualified, voices who are not affected by such vested interests.
Regardless of the ethics of the initial developers of the individual fission researchers, they were experts in their narrow field. They could never be held responsible for not realizing that MAD was the only outcome that their work would result in. The development of the MAD determination was made by the rest of the general public once the full facts of what those initial fission researchers had developed came to public knowledge.
The article is proposing that that public debate happen during or before development so that laws can be made to robustly protect the public from a new technology in the event that it’s misused.
That’s not what’s being asked. No one person, or team of people, can determine that.
What the article is proposing is that creators of new technologies inform the public so that the general public can decide if new laws are required to prevent that new technology from being misused against the public at large.
There’s precedents here and I’ve written a ton of comments about them if you want to read a bit about why such a proposition is the only ethical option.
>It’s not clear to me that anyone can predict the consequences of technology
That’s the whole point of the article, no one person can ever figure that stuff out. That’s why the public needs tone informed. No matter how educated (malicious or not) an “elite” is, they’ll never be able to predict as much as the general public will.
Yet a wider public debate can.
Your example about greenhouse gases is a good example of this. Forget about the celebrities for a sec and look at the big picture:
The guys in the hydrocarbon industry were experts at their jobs: developing oil, coal & gas and selling those products. Likewise the car industry, experts at building and selling cars.
Their expertise is in building their particular products and selling them. They could not have been expected to understand the negative environmental effects. And moreover, it’s in their interest to ignore the negatives associated with their products because it’s much more profitable for them to produce cheap products that require little R&D.
It took insights from the general public outside those industries to realize how those products affect the population as a whole:
- Burning hydrocarbons releases far more CO2 than the planet can scrub via the carbon cycle, which has lead to the greenhouse effect. Not only that but certain types of coal produce the smog that once blighted our cities and literally killed people with weak respiratory systems. Not only all of that but the lead that was added to gas to prevent engines knocking, kills people too.
- Emmisions from cars not only add CO2 to the greenhouse effect but other car emissions such as carbon nanoparticles, Nitric Oxides, sulfuric compounds also result in measurable deaths among the populations living among those cars.
As a result, laws are passed to make cars release less emissions and also to reduce societal dependence on hydrocarbons. The public debate resulted in the population realizing that there are health hazards to both individuals in the short term and global climate in the long term, and resulted in laws being passed to reduce these health hazards as low as is possible right now.
Without informed public debate we’d never have realized that these negative effects occur and we’d never have saved as many lives as has been saved now that our cities are not drenched in lead and Nitric Oxide saturated smog.
The general public too. Ask any non-nerd if they are aware that by accessing their Gmail account via a third party service, that that service can read their emails. I’m sure that the majority will be freaked out by even the notion that that would be possible. Horrified even.
Then ask them if they understand just how much data Google & Facebook has on their browsing history via cookies, third-party trackers, adboxes & share buttons.
Then ask them if they know that, if they did an ancestry check, their DNA data may soon be shared with their insurance provider?
Then ask them if they know that their credit history was probably leaked to the public via the Equifax hack?
Then ask them if they know that all that data is legally allowed to be used forever with minimal oversight other than what’s mandated by law?
All of the above is obvious to nerds like us but the public at large haven’t got a clue about any of this.
None of those actions were the result of an informed public debate.
In fact, they’re all actions that show that an informed public debate regarding new technologies is needed to protect the public from not only unscrupulous businesses or external threats but to protect the public from their own authorities.
Without public debate and a public that demands robust protection in the fit of laws, misused technologies represent a threat to everyone until that debate is had.
Einstein alerted the authorities about the dangers on Aug 2nd, a month before the war had even started and long before the US had joined the fight.
But the authorities kept it secret, choosing to develop these weapons.
But, had those weapons not been developed in secret and an informed public debate occurred before development, that debate would have inevitably lead to the MAD doctrine. That is the only inevitable outcome of nuclear war.
Without the guidance that MAD provides, politicians in 1939 did what they thought was the rational choice, and chose to develop these weapons so that they weren’t left unprepared if the enemy developed their nukes. But with the knowledge that MAD is the only outcome in a post nuke world, totally different scenarios become possible. They may have chosen to take action at UN-level, anti-nuclear proliferation treaties even before they got developed? Stifling the public debate just delayed the notion of anti-nuclear proliferation treaties but it did not stop them. The only result of an informed public debate on nukes is anti-nuclear proliferation treaties.
If all that had been done in 1939 as opposed to the 50’s & 60’s, the war could have been prevented before it even began!
Regardless of the crazy whataboutery, the lesson is that the public debate resulted in the ethics being decided as: “nuclear technology leads to MAD when used to create weapons, therefore laws are needed to protect the public from misuse of nuclear technology”. This debate is needed for every new technology.
Technology moves fast, faster than ever these days. And currently, we’re used to a situation where we typically operate these debates retroactively, legislating against misuse after the fact, when new technologies are created and then misused. Whereas, as this article is highlighting, the ethical way of doing things would be: to have informed public debates that allow laws to be created to robustly protect the public before a new technology is misused.
Note that nobody is accusing “new technologies” as bad. Or evil. Or anything like that. The call is simply for creators to slow this public debate to take place openly, to decide if the new technology can be misused and its repercussions in the event of that misuse and if new laws are needed to protect the public, before the possibility of their new technology being misused is even a factor.
Exactly, that is the exact question. Who should be the arbiter? The public. Everyone.
The physicists & engineers didn’t identify the MAD inevitability from developing nukes. The public did.
I’m not demonizing the physicists or engineers here either, how were they to know what the outcome of their developments could be?! But the public at large contains people who have other ways of looking at new technologies other than “this is innovative!” or “this will end the war!” this will be profitable!”. It’s these outsider viewpoints that are needed for the public to decide if laws are required in order to robustly protect the public from that new technology.
In specific implementation scenarios, these debates are pointless because we have the nukes & chemical weapons examples from recent history. The ethics are clear. I’m more speaking about developers of new technologies alerting the public at large about potential risks involved with their technology that would make robust laws protecting the public from misuse of their technology prudent.
But, in saying that, there are examples of programmers who could have alerted the public in the public interest, but kept their mouth shut instead such as the developers who developed the emissions cheat software for Volkswagen. Worse, they knew that their actions would lead to deaths among the populations in which those cars were sold because emission-related deaths have been intimately understood for decades now. That is a crime that was perpetrated at the frontlines of software development. Those guys knew what they were doing and their “secrecy” is nothing more than a bloody conspiracy to murder. They didn’t give a fuck how many have died from the emissions released by their cars during the decade they were on sale because “I’m just doing my job building the software I was asked to build” is an adequate excuse in their book.
Easy example in recent software development history: the developers who built the software controlling emissions cheating on Volkswagen cars a few years ago. That lead to nearly a decade of overly polluting cars being missold to the public. Those elevated emissions are directly responsible to deaths among the populations in which those cars were sold.
It’s not about holding particular people responsible in hindsight.
It’s about having a public debate to decide what laws are needed to robustly protect the public before the technology is even misused.
So in your examples it’d be:
- when the physicists inform the public, MAD is quickly determined as the outcome of that technology and laws made to prevent nukes being made in the first place. (And optimistically, to negate wars ever happening again due to the possibility that an aggrieved side might develop nukes) Or, because the public debate did not happen until after they were developed and deployed, to allow nukes to be developed and defer wars between nuke-enabled countries to hyper-diplomacy while making every effort to restrict development & deployment, like we currently have.
- when the chemists alert the public that chemical weapons are possibly far more effective than anyone ever imagined, then laws are made to ban their deployment. As is currently the case after informed public debate. But instead of informed public debate before the fact, millions were gassed during WW1.
- when the bureaucrats realist they can identify large swathes of the population unrestricted, laws can be brought in to restrict data gathering to protect the public from such actions.
In all of your examples, an informed public debate could have urged politicians to create laws to robustly protect the public from these technologies.
The key note to realize is that the public debate will happen. It’s inevitable. The key role that the creators of these technologies can play is to raise these ethical concerns before harm is risked. Even though the public debate did not happen until after all of the above technologies were misused, they resulted in swiftly creating laws to robustly protect the public from that technology. Delaying the debate does nothing other than risking disaster.
I know that last line sounds like hyperbolic exaggeration but it’s an inevitability that, if ignored, is unethical.
Take an example: your team has developed technology that can identify, with five nines accuracy, the yearly income of a user. That’s innovative, for sure. And nobody is taking the achievement away from your team.
But you don’t need to be Socrates to realize that what you’ve created could be used in horrifying ways. The article is asking creators to take a step back, ignore the excitement of creation for one moment, and consider if what they’re doing should be done. And if the answer is Yes, then decide if a public debate is required to protect the public from that new technology’s misuse.
Now the first reaction from many will be to scoff “fuck that, I’m just building an app here, I’ve got an investment to recoup and money to make”. That’s valid, but it’s an unethical way of looking at the act of creation. Feel free to hide behind the “I’m just doing my job” excuse, but we all know where that ended up.
That is the crux here, politicians can only make laws to protect the public at large from misuse of your newly created technology if they know about it. And the public at large can only demand robust protection (in the form of laws made by their politicians) from misuse of your technology if the public at large knows about it. Without a public debate, new technology could be misunderstood by politicians such that even if they are aware of the technology and even if they legislate, they may not make laws that robustly protect the public.
Thus, from an ethical standpoint, a public debate is needed so that robust laws are demanded and provided in order to protect the public at large from new technologies.
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”.
Of course they were all geniuses. And the project as a whole definitely was done in as ethical a way as possible. They weren’t bad people and I’m not implying that they were.
But the point isn’t anything to do with any of that. The point is that without the public’s input, these weapons were developed and used in the very first place, without an informed debate to decide if this is how we want to conduct ourselves.
This kind of debate was as common back then as it is today and back then it lead to chemical weapons being banned after WW1 by the UN with the support of pretty much every country.
And since then, for the few years that the US was the only one with nukes, if not for the extreme restraint practiced by the higher ups, they might have happily used nukes more times (at the time, there was huge pressure to just nuke north Korea to end the Korean War).
Once it became clear that the “enemies” will catch up in the development race meaning that any future war would be nuclear, the public debate clarified very quickly upon the current philosophy: MAD is the only outcome in a nuclear war.
If this debate had been allowed to be fully conducted in an open and informed manner before nukes were developed, we might live in a world where nukes were outlawed at UN level in the same way that chemical warfare was, long before they were even developed in the first place.
Extrapolate that thought to aggressive data-gathering & storage by social media sites, genomic information ancestry services, tracking technologies and techniques developed in the name of marketing, facial recognition technologies by security firms, Three-Letter agencies recording and monitoring every web user’s actions, profiling techniques to identify depressed users etc etc etc. Right now laws are not robustly protecting the public from misuse of these technologies. In fact, a lot of the misuse of the above technologies is directly due to the fact that the politicians know that they’ve got a powerful technology at hand and decide to develop it. And when informed public debate happens, when the negative outcomes of misuse of these techniques becomes so obvious to the public at large that they demand political action en masse, laws with more robust protections for the public’s data will be forthcoming in future updates. But those are the technologies that we know about. (At least, we nerds!). What is currently in development that has similar potential to be weaponized or misused that none of us know about yet?
The intent of those cigarette laws is to stop minors from getting their hands on cigarettes. It’s not intended to make criminals of kids.