Comment on ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day
grue@lemmy.world 5 days agoI don’t know how people can build these tools with a clear conscience.
Have you seen the job market for programmers lately? It feels like it’s almost all for AI slop, abusive rentier middleman business models that add no real value, defense war contractors, or all of the above at once.
That’s not to say that it’s acceptable for people to work those jobs with a clear conscience; it’s to say that for a bunch of people the only ethical options would be to remain unemployed or leave the industry.
njordomir@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’ve been seeing exactly that. Reading through these job descriptions is a bit depressing. I can’t virtue signal my lack of morality and unthinking subservience to my potential employer hard enough to make cutoff to become “Director of AI Shilling” or a “Dark Pattern Consent Violation Engineer”.
I know the kind of environments that won’t work for me. This will always limit the jobs I can and can’t work and I’m generally okay with that. I would love some of that bountiful defence contractor money, but I can’t ethically justify doing work that harms others or limits their freedom. Advertising tech would have been a good fit for me… if I had no sense of ethics.
It’s a tough realization that my gaming consoles, GPS Smart Watch, and fancy modern over-engineered car only became possible because tons of money was poured into building out related tech for defence and surveillance.
I imagine the cognitive dissonance must be really strong in someone working for some of these companies that have monetized governmentally sanctioned or corporately opportunistic civil rights abuses. Then again, we’re often kept apart, working in our own little areas where we’re safe from having to see the whole horrifying machine.