Ethics

Consent Is Required

As I sit here attempting to decide what exactly belongs in this intro, I wonder how many more times someone is going to remind me exactly how important consent is, or remind me how easy it is to lose sight over how much influence any individual has over another. In addition to how easy it is to miss the connections between some action and its outcome; the more layers of indirection required as any system increase in size, the harder it becomes to even describe how, or who plays which part. The ease at which anyone might forget, or how the difficulty grows as the system becomes more complex, doesn’t seem to be the part that irks me. Sadly, the more I look for it, the more I see software engineers directly, or indirectly through the systems they drive, ignore consent when it’s expedient: This is bad! The behavior of these systems come from decisions that an engineer made. Engineers can, and should make the best decision, that also does what’s right by the people who use these systems. While admittedly, they don’t often feel like it; the ethical decisions are easy decisions to make. As engineers, collectively, we should take pride in what we build such that we want to make the best decision. Enough pride, that we all also feel embarrassed when we fail to do so.