Spring is on the way!

Depends on how we’re using the words.

Ethics and morals are dual concepts. They exist only in relation to other things.

Tech in the sense of an artifact laying inert and unused on a table? Yes. Tech as in ‘the tech industry?’ or science as in ‘the culture of academic research?’ No.

File under ‘no, I do not want to listen to some nerd say what they think the code did. I want to copy and paste it.

Ani Difranco said, "any tool is a weapon if you hold it right."

We're the engineers. We're holding the tools.

It's our job to infuse ethics into this an-ethical system.

Nobody else will.

Don't work on shit that will make things worse. That's my Saturday morning message.

12/12

If you are a young sprout of an engineer, I urge you to think on ethics. Don't fool yourself that you'll be able to outsmart capitalism and somehow infuse ethics into a public company. That's not what companies do.

Just ... don't work on things that you can see will make shit worse.

11/?

The option to -stop- most of the harm is not, so far as I can see, available to individuals anymore. These gears are huge and powerful and inhuman.

Individuals can at best choose to not directly contribute to the harm. Perhaps we can make stuff that will help instead.

That's what we get.

10/?

Bringing the threads together: We've got massively wealthy individuals and (more dangerous) an-ethical constructs who have more than enough power to create world ending technologies - and all the top-line incentives point towards "move fast and break shit."

That's true right now.

9/?

Here's another ratchet: Corporations are, by design, an-ethical machines that turn capital into more capital.

If you let that one run without any counterbalance, you get trans-national megacorps.

8/?

Here's one of the ratchets: Once you have money, it's easier to make more money.

If you just let that one run for a while, you get billionaires and an oligarchy. It's easy to get distracted by the antics of any particular billionaire, but they're symptoms, not causes.

7/?

I think a lot about root causes and systemic / emergent behaviors.

The most powerful gears driving the world (or organizations) are ratchets - they turn in only one direction. If you have a system where all the incentives turn in the same direction, the outcome is basically inevitable.

6/?

It’s been almost 30 years since I took that engineering ethics course. Now I’m the grizzled consulting engineer who has Seen Some Shit.

I pivoted away from military R&D and to bioinformatics not least in the hope that my work would help more people … or at least not hasten Skynet.

5/?

It bugged me enough that I enrolled in a graduate class at the University of Michigan titled ‘Engineering Ethics.’

One of the core theses of the class was that technology itself is amoral and an-ethical.

It’s what we do with it, and to whom, and why. That’s where the ethics lives.

4/?

When I was just a young sprout of an engineer, I worked on a project training neural nets to do real-time target selection on tactical missile platforms.

Having watched both Terminator, and War Games, the possibilities were immediately clear to me.

3/?

I’m keenly aware that this is not a new conversation. The development of atomic weapons is the foundation of the genre. The thing is, nukes are super hard and expensive to get working.

Synthetic biology is not quite mass-market accessible, but it’s damn close.

2/?

Tip 6: Final one for this thread - gardening and management are both disciplines of maintenance. If you are not the sort who enjoys checking in regularly and making small adjustments most days - maybe gardening (and management) are not for you.

7/7

Tip 5: Pruning is essential. Most plants, and all teams, benefit from an occasional inspection to remove unneeded branches, vines, meetings and responsibilities.

Done skillfully, the plant redirects its energy in the desired directions without any need for command and control.

6/?

Tip 4: There’s plenty of blame to go around without blaming the plant itself. We needed more rain, less rain, less early heat, later frost …

It’s a poor gardener who blames the plant, and it’s a poor manager who blames their report.

5/?

Tip 3: Sometimes you have to thin out perfectly good seedlings to establish appropriate spacing.

The gardener looks after the whole garden, and sometimes that means it’s just bad luck for a perfectly good sprout that happened to come up too close to its sibling.

4/?