I'm not blindly blaming the bottom developer. I've played my role in past waves as well as many other developers. I'm not a CEO, so I don't know how to communicate this same message to a CEO. But as a developer, I know I've been an ignorant participant in the past. Willfully or not. And I can change my role in the next coming wave.
We developers are not blameless. If we accept that we are playing a role; then we can be proactive in preventing this and influencing the direction things go. CEOs need developers to achieve what they want.
I'm not saying it's easy. I won't even hold it against folks that decide to go in a separate direction than mine. But I at least hope we can be open about the impact we each have; and that we are not powerless here.
I'm tired. I'm tired of developers/techies not realizing their active role in creating a net negative in the world. And acting like they are powerless and blameless for it. My past self is not innocent in this; but I'm actively trying to make progress as I make a concerted effort to challenge people to think about it whenever I can.
After countless of times that the tech industry (and developers specifically) have gone from taking an interesting technical challenge that quickly require some sort of ethical or moral tradeoff which ends up absolutely shaping the fabric of society for the worse.
Creating powerful search engines to feed information to all who want it; but we'll need to violate your privacy in an irreversible way to feed the engine. Connecting the world with social media; while stealing your information and mass exposing you to malicious manipulation. Hard problems to solve without the ethical tradeoff? Sure. But every other technical challenge was also hard and solved, why can't we also focus on the social problems?
I'm tired of the word "progress" being used without a qualifier of what kind of progress and at the cost of what. Technical progress at the cost of societal regression is still seen as progress. And I'm just tired of it.
Every time that "AI skeptics" are brought up as a topic; the focus is entirely on the technical challenges. They never mention the "skeptics" that are considered that because they aren't skeptical of what AI is and could be capable. I'm skeptical if the tradeoffs being made will benefit society overall; or just a few. Because at literally every previous turn for as long as I've been alive; the impact is a net negative to the total population, without developer questioning their role in it.
I don't have an answer for how to solve this. I don't have an answer on how to stop the incoming shift in destroying countless lives. But I'd like developers to start being honest in their active role in not just accepting this new status quo; but proactively pushing us us in a regressive manner. And our power to push back on this coming wave.
We developers are not blameless. If we accept that we are playing a role; then we can be proactive in preventing this and influencing the direction things go. CEOs need developers to achieve what they want.
I'm not saying it's easy. I won't even hold it against folks that decide to go in a separate direction than mine. But I at least hope we can be open about the impact we each have; and that we are not powerless here.