Meanwhile a voice from the information-weapons industry. This former Google engineer writes:
But what Cambridge Analytica did was hardly unique or unusual in recent years: a week rarely goes by when some part of the Internet, working as intended, doesn’t cause appreciable harm.
I didn’t come up in computer science; I began my career as a physicist. That transition gave me a specific perspective on this situation. That the field of computer science, unlike other sciences, has not yet faced serious negative consequences for the work its practitioners do.
Chemistry had its first reckoning with dynamite; horror at its consequences led its inventor, Alfred Nobel, to give his fortune to the prize that bears his name. Only a few years later, its second reckoning began when chemist Clara Immerwahr committed suicide the night before her husband and fellow chemist, Fritz Haber, went to stage the first poison gas attack on the Eastern Front. Physics had its reckoning when nuclear bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so many physicists became political activists — some for arms control, some for weapons development. Human biology had eugenics. Medicine had Tuskegee and thalidomide. Civil engineering, a series of building, bridge, and dam collapses. (My thanks to many Twitter readers for these examples.)
These events profoundly changed their respective fields, and the way people come up in them. Before these crises, each field was dominated by visions of how it could make the world a better place. New dyes, new materials, new sources of energy, new modes of transport — everyone could see the beauty. Afterward, everyone became painfully aware of how their work could be turned against their dreams.
Software engineers continue to treat safety and ethics as specialities, rather than the foundations of all design; young engineers believe they just need to learn to code, change the world, disrupt something. Business leaders focus on getting a product out fast, confident that they will not be held to account if that product fails catastrophically. Simultaneously imagining their products as changing the world and not being important enough to require safety precautions, they behave like kids in a shop full of loaded AK-47’s.
