alt Hacker NewsI'll never forget this spot on NPR where they interviewed a machine learning engineer working on AI videos. The engineer was purely focused on how cool the technology is, how real it looks, etc.
The interviewer asked, "aren't you worried about this getting into the hands of the wrong people, and creating deepfakes for extortion and things like that?"
The engineer paused for a few seconds, and then said, "gosh I never even considered that." She created this monster and all she could think about was how neat it was technologically.
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Yeah engineering as a discipline tends to be pretty naïve to the consequences of what they build, and sociopaths take advantage of it. Norbert Wiener [1] observed this about the engineers working on nukes in the 1940s-1950s:
“Push-button warfare... possible for a limited group of people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions, without any immediate risk to themselves.... Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round.”
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in university, we used to have at least one engineering ethics class in undergrad. Have they stopped those? It sure seems like it, given how many engineers are out there who only seem to care about how technically cool and interesting their projects are.