Should Data Scientists Adhere to a Hippocratic Oath?

https://www.wired.com/story/should-data-scientists-adhere-to-a-hippocratic-oath/

A growing amount of my time is being spent countering Silicon Valley spin:

Aral Balkan argues that an ethics code like that drafted this week could actually worsen societal harms caused by technology. He fears it will be used by corporations as a signal of virtue, while they continue business as usual. “What we should be exploring is how we can stop this mass farming of human data for profit…” https://mastodon.ar.al/media/NnSLeFSy5jMqkqv3lrE

@aral Corporations don't need a code of ethics. They need democratic governments holding guns to their heads, ready to shut them down at the first sign of malfeasance.

Getting there, of course, is the hard part.

@starbreaker Boom! (Literally and figuratively) :)

@aral IMO, the US government didn't go for enough when they settled for breaking up the Bell System. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System)

They should have utterly destroyed AT&T. They should have nationalized the POTS infrastructure, made Bell Labs a civilian R&D agency, and put all of AT&T's patents, copyrights, and other IP into the public domain, including UNIX.

I think this would have solved a great many problems, and prevented future problems by setting a precedent.

@starbreaker @aral I strongly agree that a democracy must have a lot of power to protect itself against corporate misdeeds.

And it's an interesting idea: what if the consequences of violating the public good were to be nationalized with no return for shareholders?

@byronalley @aral

You'd have a lot of conservatives crapping themselves in public over "government overreach" and "punishing businesses for succeeding", for starters.

@starbreaker @aral So you call it capital punishment, for corporations.

😎

@byronalley @aral

I call it bringing back the "corporate death penalty". Apparently corporations used to get nuked for malfeasance on a regular basis in the 19th century, which was why you had really big business concerns like Standard Oil organized as trusts (hence the term antitrust).

@starbreaker @aral It's edgy-trendy rn to rail against "capitalism" but really the problem is we're doing it so wrong. Corporations that have thousands of shareholders and that protect them from ethical responsibility for the corporation's actions while forcing their officers to prioritize shareholder value... That's not inherent in capitalism. It's a perversion.

Limited liability is good for emboldening new business ideas, but it must not be carte blanche.

@byronalley @aral

No, limited liability should not be carte blanche.

As for anti-capitalism being edgy: when I see people with more money than they could possibly spend using that money to buy influence in government, I become a lot less sympathetic to talk of capitalism being "perverted".

Money is power. Power corrupts.
Excessive concentration of wealth is inimical to individual rights and the rule of law, which is reason enough to forcibly redistribute it.

@starbreaker @aral Power corrupts in some ways and less in others--eg. there's a reason for philanthropists.

Simon Sinek has useful points about how we don't mind people having power as long as they're good leaders, and a major weakness of large-scale politico-economic systems is giving power to the ambitious. You don't have to be moral to make money and that's a problem when money is power.

But all systems do that. The key is building better safeguards into the system.