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"Things I wont work with" is a great concept that tech should borrow from chemistry. Some things, while they carry possible returns on investment, are simply n

"Things I wont work with" is a great concept that tech should borrow from chemistry. Some things, while they carry possible returns on investment, are simply not worth the risk. I wonder what "Things I wont work with" would be for tech. I can imagine particular technologies (e.g. predictive policing) or types of data (e.g. I refuse to put digitized therapist's notes on the internet).

jeanlucas 7y ago
I try to apply this to my own work, nowadays I work with financial software in South America, and I have the power to suggest what to use and what to avoid. I decided, and yet to know if it's a good idea or not, to instead of worrying about leaking data, not collect some types of data at all.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  > to instead of worrying about leaking data, not collect some types of data at all. Interestingly, this has probably been the main beneficial effect of the GDPR so far. Personal data has shifted from being a pure asset to a combo of asset and liability, causing some companies to just avoid collecting anything but the essentials.
Jestar342 7y ago
> I refuse to put digitized therapist's notes on the internet There is just no way that doesn't already happen all over the place already. The "things I won't work with" blog lists things that will actually kill you in horrible, mind bendingly painful ways. In Tech it's more like "things I won't work with because it might fail" or "is too difficult" or "might be a bit too unscrupulous"
- paranoidrobot 7y ago
  > In Tech it's more like "things I won't work with because it might fail" or "is too difficult" or "might be a bit too unscrupulous" For some of things, sure. But there are other things that do cause death, pain and suffering. If you wrote code that's used in military weapons, that's a more direct relationship. If you write code that's used to power gambling sites/devices, it's perhaps somewhat abstract - but there are a large number of people who are harmed because of how addictive these things are. If you write code that's used for managing high-interest loans (like the point-of-sales type of 'buy-now-pay-later' of loans) - then you're enabling the exploitation of people who by-and-large cannot afford the things they're being told they can have, and will spend a large portion of their life paying these loans off.
  - Jestar342 7y ago
    All of which are orthogonal to the blog. The blog is about things the author won't work with out of fear of personal injury. Not writing software for a high interest loan's sake is far from the same. Being true to one's own ethics is a very worthy virtue. But it just isn't in the same league as not wanting to melt one's face off or accidentally die in a paralysing seizure of excruciating pain.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    And yet, military weapons serve a necessary purpose. All of us would agree that some military is always necessary. You listed products that are "exploitative", but would you have an issue with working for a manufacturer of hard liquor, a substance with significant addictive potential? What of a gunsmith? A knife manufacturer? Many products have the potential for abuse; few are _inherently_ unethical. If you have ethical qualms, fine, but there seems to be a tendency to condemn those whose ethical qualms do not prohibit producing and selling such things.
    - Vindicis 7y ago
      What purpose is that? To project power and bully people, sure. If everyone has a gun, no one has a gun. If no one has a gun, everyone has a gun. If one person has a gun, he calls the shots.
      - big_chungus 7y ago
        Self-defense. It's basic game theory that we will never have a world where no one has a gun. This remains true on a national level.
    - davidgould 7y ago
      > If you have ethical qualms, fine, but there seems to be a tendency to condemn those whose ethical qualms do not prohibit ... That's sort of the point of ethics though, it's pretty weak to say "I choose not to steal because it is wrong, but you do you."
- MengerSponge 7y ago
  Just because it's done all over the place already is no excuse for you to do it better.
  - Jestar342 7y ago
    Disagree, though it depends on the measure of "better". If there's a market for therapists to digitize their notes and store them online, then I'd want that software to be secure. Should the creators of Gmail or Word or etc feel bad because therapists are using their services to send their notes to colleagues?
- girvo 7y ago
  I can tell you that they indeed are going over the internet, being put into a cloud based notes system for medical data at least where my girlfriend works as an optometrist (they have psychologists, GPs, surgeons, etc and they all use the same system)
vidanay 7y ago
I have never had the opportunity, but I personally would never work with life critical software.
malux85 7y ago
No helping oppressive governments spy on dissidents. No high frequency trading. No financial targeting the vulnerable (subjective, use your own ethics and good judgement) No dragnets No devices to disrupt tor or P2P networks No troll farming or mass media manipulation No fake dating profiles No metric stuffing That’s it off the top of my head. I know that sometimes secondary effects can happen (e.g. an oppressive government may use a database, and I might work on that database) but that’s not me directly helping them. Something like this, feel free to add others everyone!
- Zaskoda 7y ago
  Now if someone will make some sort of union I can join so I can strike and support others who share the same fundamental ethics. :)
- narrator 7y ago
  No fully automated slaughterbots. There has to be a man in the loop that at least clicks a mouse every time the robot kills an enemy combatant. No one should ever say: "Oh yeah, we had a bug in the auto-kill algo and our killer robot shot a whole bunch of innocent civilians. Whoops! That's nobody's fault. Nobody's responsible. The algo did it all by itself!"
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    I'm completely with you, but eventually "we" won't have a choice when adversaries go full autonomous.
  - blotter_paper 7y ago
    In the context of a military that accepts collateral damage as par for the course, I don't really see the distinction. Did anybody but Manning go to prison over that Collateral Murder video? We have humans approve airstrikes that we know will kill unidentified civilians when they're close to an identified target. We have humans approve airstrikes that target unidentified individuals which we probabilistically identify as combatants based on movement and cellphone metadata. What difference does it make if a human pulls the trigger --err, presses the button?
jellicle 7y ago
The "good" thing about dangerous chemistry is that it is dangerous, first and foremost, to the chemist. Inspiring some caution in the majority of chemists. The bad thing about dangerous tech is that it is usually someone else who gets hurt, and the technologist is affected last or not at all. Predictive policing? It's not going to be rich white guys who catch the pointy end of that stick... It should probably be required by law that Zuckerberg keep nude photos of himself on his Facebook account, to encourage security.
- salty_biscuits 7y ago
  "It's not going to be rich white guys who catch the pointy end of that stick..." Detection of white collar crime? Surely detection of fraud in financial transactions isn't rocket surgery...
  - tomrod 7y ago
    The problem with the fraud domain is finding all the holes in the dike.
JshWright 7y ago
> (e.g. I refuse to put digitized therapist's notes on the internet) So... No EHRs?
- eropple 7y ago
  EHRs don't imply internet access.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    Even if there's no internet access on the EHR itself, many are accessed through, say RDP anyway.
  - JshWright 7y ago
    Cloud based EHRs (run by actual professionals) are a lot safer than a "local" EHR, administered by the admin assistant's second cousin, Larry, who took an A+ course back in 2000-something...
matthewfcarlson 7y ago
More of an embedded/firmware engineer who happens to also be a web developer, I had a rule that I wouldn't make anything that directly killed people. I had many friends go work at various defense companies designing missile control systems. That said, their stories about the challenges and what sort of places they went were fascinating. I'm glad someone did it. I'm just glad it wasn't me.
- girvo 7y ago
  I was in the process of being hired to work on tech like that last year. The technical challenges and constraints were so exciting, but I couldn’t get past my moral and ethical problems with writing software that kills people, so I ended up turning down the offer
CamouflagedKiwi 7y ago
My first thought was "more than 2 consecutive *'s" which has something of a resonance with the higher oxidation states the author mentions being wary of.
Florin_Andrei 7y ago
> I wonder what "Things I wont work with" would be for tech Computer tech is nowhere near as spectacular as chemistry, in an immediate, palpable sense. Almost nothing is. Maybe some narrow areas of physics or real-world engineering. But chemistry is pretty much unique that way. Chemistry is a great hobby to pick up when you're a teen. Well, assuming you survive the whole thing.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
I knew someone that claimed he would not work with gambling applications on moral principle, I didn't much respect the stuff he had built as it seemed all brochure ware about 6 years behind the times but at any rate he had the one standard.
patrickmay 7y ago
> I wonder what "Things I wont work with" would be for tech. Online voting. Anything more sophisticated than automated scanning of a paper ballot cannot be trusted, even in theory. Always, always be able to do an audit from the original ballots.
- mulmen 7y ago
  I would expand that to include electronic voting in general. Even air gaps are not satisfactory.

jeanlucas 7y ago

I try to apply this to my own work, nowadays I work with financial software in South America, and I have the power to suggest what to use and what to avoid. I decided, and yet to know if it's a good idea or not, to instead of worrying about leaking data, not collect some types of data at all.

rsynnott 7y ago
> to instead of worrying about leaking data, not collect some types of data at all. Interestingly, this has probably been the main beneficial effect of the GDPR so far. Personal data has shifted from being a pure asset to a combo of asset and liability, causing some companies to just avoid collecting anything but the essentials.

Jestar342 7y ago

> I refuse to put digitized therapist's notes on the internet There is just no way that doesn't already happen all over the place already. The "things I won't work with" blog lists things that will actually kill you in horrible, mind bendingly painful ways. In Tech it's more like "things I won't work with because it might fail" or "is too difficult" or "might be a bit too unscrupulous"

paranoidrobot 7y ago
> In Tech it's more like "things I won't work with because it might fail" or "is too difficult" or "might be a bit too unscrupulous" For some of things, sure. But there are other things that do cause death, pain and suffering. If you wrote code that's used in military weapons, that's a more direct relationship. If you write code that's used to power gambling sites/devices, it's perhaps somewhat abstract - but there are a large number of people who are harmed because of how addictive these things are. If you write code that's used for managing high-interest loans (like the point-of-sales type of 'buy-now-pay-later' of loans) - then you're enabling the exploitation of people who by-and-large cannot afford the things they're being told they can have, and will spend a large portion of their life paying these loans off.
- Jestar342 7y ago
  All of which are orthogonal to the blog. The blog is about things the author won't work with out of fear of personal injury. Not writing software for a high interest loan's sake is far from the same. Being true to one's own ethics is a very worthy virtue. But it just isn't in the same league as not wanting to melt one's face off or accidentally die in a paralysing seizure of excruciating pain.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  And yet, military weapons serve a necessary purpose. All of us would agree that some military is always necessary. You listed products that are "exploitative", but would you have an issue with working for a manufacturer of hard liquor, a substance with significant addictive potential? What of a gunsmith? A knife manufacturer? Many products have the potential for abuse; few are _inherently_ unethical. If you have ethical qualms, fine, but there seems to be a tendency to condemn those whose ethical qualms do not prohibit producing and selling such things.
  - Vindicis 7y ago
    What purpose is that? To project power and bully people, sure. If everyone has a gun, no one has a gun. If no one has a gun, everyone has a gun. If one person has a gun, he calls the shots.
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      Self-defense. It's basic game theory that we will never have a world where no one has a gun. This remains true on a national level.
  - davidgould 7y ago
    > If you have ethical qualms, fine, but there seems to be a tendency to condemn those whose ethical qualms do not prohibit ... That's sort of the point of ethics though, it's pretty weak to say "I choose not to steal because it is wrong, but you do you."
MengerSponge 7y ago
Just because it's done all over the place already is no excuse for you to do it better.
- Jestar342 7y ago
  Disagree, though it depends on the measure of "better". If there's a market for therapists to digitize their notes and store them online, then I'd want that software to be secure. Should the creators of Gmail or Word or etc feel bad because therapists are using their services to send their notes to colleagues?
girvo 7y ago
I can tell you that they indeed are going over the internet, being put into a cloud based notes system for medical data at least where my girlfriend works as an optometrist (they have psychologists, GPs, surgeons, etc and they all use the same system)

vidanay 7y ago

I have never had the opportunity, but I personally would never work with life critical software.

malux85 7y ago

No helping oppressive governments spy on dissidents. No high frequency trading. No financial targeting the vulnerable (subjective, use your own ethics and good judgement) No dragnets No devices to disrupt tor or P2P networks No troll farming or mass media manipulation No fake dating profiles No metric stuffing That’s it off the top of my head. I know that sometimes secondary effects can happen (e.g. an oppressive government may use a database, and I might work on that database) but that’s not me directly helping them. Something like this, feel free to add others everyone!

Zaskoda 7y ago
Now if someone will make some sort of union I can join so I can strike and support others who share the same fundamental ethics. :)
narrator 7y ago
No fully automated slaughterbots. There has to be a man in the loop that at least clicks a mouse every time the robot kills an enemy combatant. No one should ever say: "Oh yeah, we had a bug in the auto-kill algo and our killer robot shot a whole bunch of innocent civilians. Whoops! That's nobody's fault. Nobody's responsible. The algo did it all by itself!"
- merpnderp 7y ago
  I'm completely with you, but eventually "we" won't have a choice when adversaries go full autonomous.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  In the context of a military that accepts collateral damage as par for the course, I don't really see the distinction. Did anybody but Manning go to prison over that Collateral Murder video? We have humans approve airstrikes that we know will kill unidentified civilians when they're close to an identified target. We have humans approve airstrikes that target unidentified individuals which we probabilistically identify as combatants based on movement and cellphone metadata. What difference does it make if a human pulls the trigger --err, presses the button?

jellicle 7y ago

The "good" thing about dangerous chemistry is that it is dangerous, first and foremost, to the chemist. Inspiring some caution in the majority of chemists. The bad thing about dangerous tech is that it is usually someone else who gets hurt, and the technologist is affected last or not at all. Predictive policing? It's not going to be rich white guys who catch the pointy end of that stick... It should probably be required by law that Zuckerberg keep nude photos of himself on his Facebook account, to encourage security.

salty_biscuits 7y ago
"It's not going to be rich white guys who catch the pointy end of that stick..." Detection of white collar crime? Surely detection of fraud in financial transactions isn't rocket surgery...
- tomrod 7y ago
  The problem with the fraud domain is finding all the holes in the dike.

JshWright 7y ago

> (e.g. I refuse to put digitized therapist's notes on the internet) So... No EHRs?

eropple 7y ago
EHRs don't imply internet access.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  Even if there's no internet access on the EHR itself, many are accessed through, say RDP anyway.
- JshWright 7y ago
  Cloud based EHRs (run by actual professionals) are a lot safer than a "local" EHR, administered by the admin assistant's second cousin, Larry, who took an A+ course back in 2000-something...

matthewfcarlson 7y ago

More of an embedded/firmware engineer who happens to also be a web developer, I had a rule that I wouldn't make anything that directly killed people. I had many friends go work at various defense companies designing missile control systems. That said, their stories about the challenges and what sort of places they went were fascinating. I'm glad someone did it. I'm just glad it wasn't me.

girvo 7y ago
I was in the process of being hired to work on tech like that last year. The technical challenges and constraints were so exciting, but I couldn’t get past my moral and ethical problems with writing software that kills people, so I ended up turning down the offer

CamouflagedKiwi 7y ago

My first thought was "more than 2 consecutive *'s" which has something of a resonance with the higher oxidation states the author mentions being wary of.

Florin_Andrei 7y ago

> I wonder what "Things I wont work with" would be for tech Computer tech is nowhere near as spectacular as chemistry, in an immediate, palpable sense. Almost nothing is. Maybe some narrow areas of physics or real-world engineering. But chemistry is pretty much unique that way. Chemistry is a great hobby to pick up when you're a teen. Well, assuming you survive the whole thing.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

I knew someone that claimed he would not work with gambling applications on moral principle, I didn't much respect the stuff he had built as it seemed all brochure ware about 6 years behind the times but at any rate he had the one standard.

patrickmay 7y ago

> I wonder what "Things I wont work with" would be for tech. Online voting. Anything more sophisticated than automated scanning of a paper ballot cannot be trusted, even in theory. Always, always be able to do an audit from the original ballots.

mulmen 7y ago
I would expand that to include electronic voting in general. Even air gaps are not satisfactory.