Your point about causation is a good one. Its worth thinking through the causal chain of how your work is used as an engineer, even if you conclude that you are not the proximate cause and therefore do not bear responsibility.
I live in the Delaware Valley, an area of the country devastated by engineers. Engineers built communications and automation technology, which has allowed executives to outsource and eliminate jobs far more quickly than people here can get trained for new ones. The human toll of these changes has been higher than drone and surveillance technology combined.
Are engineers working in communications and automation the proximate cause of these changes? Maybe or maybe not. But how long or short is the chain of causation? I think its not very deep, not when an automation company might market its technology by mentioning the labor cost savings. At the very least, before anyone gets sanctimonious, they should think about what sorts of impacts their own work has on other people.
> Now I work in video games, not curing cancer, but in my search I was looking for a company that at least did no harm.
Ironically, one of the reasons I left EA was that I saw my CTO and half of the programmers around me assigned to the task of figuring out how to outsource more development. That didn't seem like a winning proposition to me.
I would say that outsourcing development jobs is at least a wash. Relatively wealthy people in developed countries may be (temporarily, let's be honest) out of work, but far less wealthy people living in less developed countries will have the opportunity to make what is, for them, a good wage.
Automation is harder to justify this sort of way. Outsourcing moves jobs around, automation is intended to eliminate them (yeah yeah, we need people to make and fix the robots, but let's be real, there is a net loss of jobs and we can only hope that cheaper products will trigger the creation of new, largely unrelated, jobs.)
Yeah, a $5 an hour job is created in China, but a $20 an hour job is eliminated in America, and much of the difference is captured by some executive or shareholder in the U.S.
Automation has the potential to eliminate jobs, but also has the potential to allow much more work to be done by a single person, or allowing that person to do the same work with less effort.
Perhaps I'm overly simplifying your words, but I don't think automation is inherently "evil". Like all tools or techniques, they may be used toward good or bad ends.
Well, I wouldn't say that automation is evil, and automation certainly can be used primarily to scale processes, but I think that if a process is already running at capacity (say, you are already producing more wheat than the world needs), then automation will tend to reduce prices (or at least costs) and reduce jobs. The end-game is total automation (hopefully with everybody enjoying the fruits of that past labor, Star Trek style.)
I think that automation in general is a worthwhile endeavor, but we need to be mindful of the downsides and modify our society as we implement more automation to ensure that we are not causing undue harm. I believe that various forms of social safety-nets will become essential as we march towards automation's logical conclusion.
So if we used to build a road by having a group of 50 guys with shovels, should we just ignore the invention of the bulldozer so these men don't lose their jobs.
95% of Americans used to work in agriculture. Should we still all be farmers today because if we adapt technology then some of the farmers would lose their job?
One of the big problems with engineers is that they like solving problems, but sticking around to debate how those solutions will be used is "politics" and they say, "I hate that shit". Thus it's easy for the psychopaths who run this society to come in and use automation for bad (depriving others of participation, rather than distributing the benefits).
EA brings up a horrible (but true) thought. One of my colleagues was discussing the video game industry (which he left in disgust). People accept terrible terms to work in it, but in doing so, they make it worse for everyone. People who accept 60 cents on the dollar and mandatory 80-hour weeks and death-march projects to work in VG are making it worse for everyone else who wants to work in that industry and are, in a real way, being unethical.
I'm not anti-market, because I can't come up with anything better as a general economic problem-solving tool, but they do have the undesirable effect of often pitting have-nots against other have-nots, when it would be morally better for them to team up and maybe get a fighting chance against the haves. It's easy in New York (I lived there for 7 years) to hate "rich assholes" (and foreign speculators, and rent-control royalty) for the rent situation, but every time I paid that rent check, I was just as much a part of the problem.
Engineers built communications and automation technology, which has allowed executives to outsource and eliminate jobs far more quickly than people here can get trained for new ones. The human toll of these changes has been higher than drone and surveillance technology combined.
I think this comes down to a conflict (not very well fought from the engineers' side) between cost-cutters and excellence-maximizers. The first category want to take something that's already being done and cut people out of the action. That's not always a bad thing, because they attack inefficiencies and should, in theory, make the world richer. However, they end up taking almost all of the gains for themselves (and externalizing costs). The second also want to cut costs, remove grunt work, etc. but because they want to do more, i.e. "now that I shaved clock cycles off of this operation, that frees up resources to do more cool shit".
Businessmen tend to be cost-cutters, because that's the one thing people can agree on in executive tussles. For executives, R&D, philanthropy, etc. all devolve into bikeshedding, but the bottom line is a common language. People with vision, on the other hand, tend to get into conflicts and causes that have negative expectancy for their political fortunes. Engineers tend to be excellence-maximizers.
The excellence-maximizers do believe that they're helping society and adding value-- and they're right, at least on the latter. They cut jobs and create value. The problem is that society is run by greedy cost-cutters who have no vision but a lot of greed, and who make sure that none of the gains trickle back. Thus, those affected by the industry changes never get the resources (time, money, education) to survive them.
Right. Automation increases the overall productive capacity of a society, but does so in a way that (by reducing the demand for labor), allows holders of capital to capture more of the value generated by that production for themselves.
That said, I'm not sure what to do with that realization other than hold on to it as a vaguely disquieting feeling. I'm certainly not advocating that engineers do less in the way of creating automation or communications technology. I tend to believe its the job of the political class to reconcile technological change with societal well-being. But that same thinking applies to engineers in the defense industry as much as engineers in the automation industry.
> I tend to believe its the job of the political class to reconcile technological change with societal well-being.
In a democracy (including a representative democracy) the "political class" is the citizenry at large, so that responsibility belongs to everyone in such a society. (Accepting, arguendo, that it is an obligation of the "political class".)
I tend to believe its the job of the political class to reconcile technological change with societal well-being.
I agree-- but I also don't trust the current "political class".
It's made worse by the current Silicon Valley arrogance, which assumes everything "big" (esp. government) to be intractably mediocre (and, therefore, useless) because the whole populace (i.e. the full IQ spectrum) is a part of it. I feel like this secessionism is a rather Machiavellian move by the technological elite to convince their underlings not to see the big picture, because it's all mediocre and inefficient out there anyway. The attitudes coming out of both the technological and political elites (both anti-intellectual and limited in their own ways) are bad for both sides.
I live in the Delaware Valley, an area of the country devastated by engineers. Engineers built communications and automation technology, which has allowed executives to outsource and eliminate jobs far more quickly than people here can get trained for new ones. The human toll of these changes has been higher than drone and surveillance technology combined.
Are engineers working in communications and automation the proximate cause of these changes? Maybe or maybe not. But how long or short is the chain of causation? I think its not very deep, not when an automation company might market its technology by mentioning the labor cost savings. At the very least, before anyone gets sanctimonious, they should think about what sorts of impacts their own work has on other people.