"Do you regret building the internet because of surveillance?" is the new "Do you regret discovering fission because of the bomb?"
Now, as a technologist I'd never directly contribute to a project whose intent was to kill or surveil people. (I turned down that cushy DoD contract job straight out of college.)
But this whole "as engineers we need to consider the ethical implications" argument is deeply flawed. First, it assumes we can predict how the technology we build will be used. Second, even if we could predict all the uses, should we refrain from building something that has some good uses, just because it has some bad ones? Third...what about the people actually using the thing for evil?
We might as well drop the "as engineers" part and just have a discussion about not doing evil things in general.
Obviously we are limited by our predictive capacity, but I don't think "there might be bad and good uses" is really a strong argument. Like anything else, you weigh the good against the bad in making your decision.
That's the thing though. How does one weigh the good against the bad in these cases?
If you're building stuff at the application layer, maybe the use is obvious, but if you're writing a library or a service, how can you know how it will be used? Should you expend time enumerating and assigning probabilistic weights to all the good and evil that could come from it?
Far simpler proscription: as a human using a tool, don't do evil with the tool.
You do your best, along whatever axes are situationally appropriate.
For what it's worth, a sufficiently generic tool I think tends to balance toward morally positive, because there is more intent to do good than intent to do harm out there. But of course, helping to grow that disparity is still important, which is why you should be looking to see if there's ways in which your tool radically, disproportionately facilitates harm.
Now, as a technologist I'd never directly contribute to a project whose intent was to kill or surveil people. (I turned down that cushy DoD contract job straight out of college.)
But this whole "as engineers we need to consider the ethical implications" argument is deeply flawed. First, it assumes we can predict how the technology we build will be used. Second, even if we could predict all the uses, should we refrain from building something that has some good uses, just because it has some bad ones? Third...what about the people actually using the thing for evil?
We might as well drop the "as engineers" part and just have a discussion about not doing evil things in general.