Should computer science researchers disclose negative social consequences? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05791-w <comment><USER3> I've realized there's another thing about this proposal that bothers me: it's basically waterfall software development. Agile is by no means a panacea, but there's a reason it replaced the "specify in advance what everything will need to look like and how it will work together" method. Instead, you need to just start building pieces that move you towards your eventual goal, roughly envisioned, and know that you will need to iterate on that frequently to respond to what you learn along the way. The motivation of this proposal seems to be that we can know in advance what the impact of a new piece of technology is, and therefore we can just avoid ever developing the bad stuff, so we won't have to deal with the hard work of changing it later.

But, we cannot, and it's dangerous to think we can. After we develop technology, we will be surprised at how it is used and what the impact is, and we will have to respond to that, sometimes with more technology and sometimes with legislation and sometimes with changes in social mores. Thinking that developers can just anticipate in advance what will happen, is at best delusional, like thinking that if we spend more time on the specifications part of our next waterfall project, we can do better.

Moreover, if Tim Berners-Lee had specified in advance, "this world-wide web thing will probably eviscerate all advertising-supported media, from newspapers to magazines to radio and television", I don't know that we would have made wiser choices as a result of that.

<comment><USER4> What brother's me about this comment is the implicit assumption that waterfall is a universal bad and things that are less waterfall more agile are good/better.

This is incredibly false. Agile (or non-waterfall) style development is useful in specific limited cases. Where you're creating something where the cost of failure discovery is small. You're writing a mobile app, or a b2b website, or some other common problem. It's cheap and easy, and the cost of a failure is so small that it's cheaper to just fail and go from there, then to spend anytime thinking about how something may fail.

If you're doing something mission critical, space shuttle, something involving expensive parts, something high risk, you make sure you do thorough requirements analysis, well specified behavior, and well defined failure modes. You break the system down into individual small components (the more critical the failure the smaller the components) create well defined specifications for each component, test the he'll out of each one indicidually, ensure they work to spec and then combine them. You don't Agile your way through it.

Agile, you'd just get something minimal working end to end and iterate. If the thing you're working on can explode you don't just iterate through a minimal user story. You define each item well and ensure it meets it's specs and you understand it's failure modes.

Same thing for the topic at had on impact of technology. Understand the failure modes of the components you're creating - and write them in your paper.

<comment> j-pb I present you SpaceX as an amazing counterexample to "agile don't work for things that explode".

I would much rather sit in a rocket that has blown up a 100 times on the launch pad but launched succesfully a thousand times more with each time being an opportunity to improve it, than one that has been engineered with waterfall and never flown...

[https://spacenews.com/pentagon-advisory-panel-dod-could- take...](https://spacenews.com/pentagon-advisory-panel-dod-could-take-a-page- from-spacex-on-software-development/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find this new trend of trying to predict how technology will be used - <USER2> presuming its users will either be evil or too stupid to use it responsibly incredibly patronizing.

Engineers are not philosophers and should not be placed in this role. We do not have the tools to do it. As with any human we have a duty to consider first order effects - but even the most astute philosopher will have trouble anticipating second order effects. This burden should not be placed on those least qualified to perform it.

Edit: Thank you to everyone for your thoughtful replies. I find this topic fascinating to discuss.

<comment><USER6> > _I find this new trend of trying to predict how technology will be used - > and presuming its users will either be evil or too stupid to use it > responsibly incredibly patronizing._

People who create something, who research something, should by definition have a better grasp on their topic than everyone else. To expect that they are more knowledgeable, and therefore better equipped to see what it means, and therefore also have a civic duty to explain this to less well-informed, not not patronizing. It's acknowledging their expertise.

> _Engineers are not philosophers and should not be placed in this role._

This is an interview in _Nature_. Academics with the ambition to publish in academic journals, be they prestigious like Nature or Science, or smaller and more niche like <insert your favourite journal here>, _are_ taking on a role of a philosopher.

And sure, engineers may "just" apply technology by comparison, but honestly I find that a very dismissive attitude as well. They are the "praxis" to academia's "theory", meaning that what they do actually has consequences in our lives. So if anything, their works comes with even more of a moral obligation to "Do The Right Thing" than that of academics.

<comment><USER5> > People who create something, who research something, should by definition > have a better grasp on their topic than everyone else. To expect that they > are more knowledgeable, and therefore better equipped to see what it means, > and therefore also have a civic duty to explain this to less well-informed, > not not patronizing. It's acknowledging their expertise.

They are experts in how the technology works. That doesn't make them an expert in how other humans will take advantage of what they have discovered/created. I've taken the charity of assuming the scientist or engineer themselves had non-evil aims.

> This is an interview in Nature. Academics with the ambition to publish in > academic journals, be they prestigious like Nature or Science, or smaller > and more niche like <insert your favourite journal here>, are taking on a > role of a philosopher.

Yes, but a philosopher on which topic? A doctorate from an engineering background is not equally as educated as someone with degrees in history or other studies of human nature in regards to the societal effects of technology.

<comment> s-shellfish Doctorate of philosophy.

The Ph in PhD actually means something. It's not some kitschy decoration.

<comment><USER7> The Ph in PhD refers to natural philosophy, which diverged from moral philosophy early on.

<comment> s-shellfish How is natural philosophy different from moral philosophy?

I'm sure that comes across as a dumb question, but, modernity - technology.

The irony of mathematics being naturally built in, reinforced into all of us, over and over. Computer science.

From wikipedia:

> From the ancient world, starting with Aristotle, to the 19th century, the > term "natural philosophy" was the common term used to describe the practice > of studying nature. It was in the 19th century that the concept of "science" > received its modern shape with new titles emerging such as "biology" and > "biologist", "physics" and "physicist" among other technical fields and > titles; institutions and communities were founded, and unprecedented > applications to and interactions with other aspects of society and culture > occurred.[1] Isaac Newton's book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia > Mathematica (1687), whose title translates to "Mathematical Principles of > Natural Philosophy", reflects the then-current use of the words "natural > philosophy", akin to "systematic study of nature". Even in the 19th century, > a treatise by Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait, which helped define much > of modern physics, was titled Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867).

> "systematic study of nature"

And what do we do? What is nature to study? What is life to study?

Our own puzzled face, staring back at us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree that it's unlikely that anyone can predict broad, long-term consequences of any particular technology. On the other hand, the people who design Facebook or mobile games to be maximally addicting definitely understand something about how their software is affecting society. It's not a huge leap to go from "I'm pretty sure that certain people will become obsessed with this," to "It's probably harmful for lots of people to become obsessed with this."

If a person can predict the consequences of design decisions well enough to get paid for it, they'll probably have some idea of potential negative consequences as well.

<comment><USER3> There may be cases where negative consequences can be predicted, but this sure isn't it. Of all the predictions I heard about Facebook when it was new, "fake news" and "depression from comparing yourself to friends out having fun" and "an increasingly clickbaity and outrage-stoking newsmedia" were not among them. Not even close. Facebook is a great example of how programmers are not good at predicting negative consequences. The predictions I heard were mostly based on comparisons with Myspace and Livejournal. We are not good at this. Plumbers shouldn't try to do your electrical wiring, doctors shouldn't try to manage your database, legislators shouldn't try to pick your programming language, and programmers should not try to determine how society will react to technology.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure it's so much a matter of picking negative consequences out of the blue sky of possible consequences, but rather wondering, "What happens if our software works exactly how we intend and we gain the ability to really manipulate people in a certain way?"

I agree completely that it's hard or impossible to just predict in general how society will react to technology. But in many cases, there are people designing systems specifically for the purpose of getting people to behave a certain way. This implicitly acknowledges that they believe that they can affect behavior in a predictable way. If they can make predictions one way and be correct enough to profit from it, they should be capable of making predictions about things that could go wrong.

I agree completely that predicting something like what Facebook will look like 10 years in the future is impossible, and there's surely a lot of research where the possible consequences are infinite. A lot of results in CS research are like someone developing a new material - "Like, sure, this could be used to make a new, extra deadly tank or something, but it could be used for literally anything." In that sense, it's not useful to make predictions, but I think there's also a lot of research going on at Facebook and Google that looks closer to what I mentioned above, where they absolutely have an intention to change people's behavior and so probably also have the ability to predict the consequences of their complete success.

<comment><USER9> These are two different set of people: computer scientists develop algos / ml / etc, and want to publish them. UX designers , entrepreneurs, and other customer-focused people in the industry observe human behavior, and (amongst other activities) design traps around them.

It is not useful to expect good predictions from the former group, and the later group isn't really interested in publishing in CS.

<comment><USER10> The Challenger disaster is a good example of the engineer vs group dynamic [https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/03/21/470870426...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/03/21/470870426/challenger-engineer-who-warned-of-shuttle-disaster- dies)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see multiple top level comments spouting righteous indignation about this being patronizing to engineers/programmers, expecting too much of them, 1st order -vs- 2nd order effects, etc.

Firstly, this is for _researchers /academics_ who are _publishing_ in journals, disseminating ideas for new technology.

Secondly, the suggestion also clearly states that the work will be reviewed NOT by judging the utility in the possible consequences, but for the thoroughness of the analysis. In practice, that means that the paper's authors can not be more sloppy than the reviewer (a peer in the field who can be assumed to have a roughly similar understanding of the technology). Reviewer feedback can point out any blind spots of the paper. That strikes me as a reasonable and concrete setup unlike the FUD in these discussions.

 _Nobody is being asked to balance the positives against the negatives. They are simply requested to initiate a conversation about the possible negatives so that other researchers building on the idea can work towards improving those aspects!_

(EDIT: Most papers/presentations already talk about the possible positive impacts -- nobody holds back on that for lack of expertise. It is only fair to ask authors to be less partisan and more thorough, as responsible researchers.)

Whether all engineers/programmers should take analogous responsibility in trying to anticipate the consequences of their work is a related, but different question, with different trade-offs involved -- because engineers are concerned more with building things and delivering practical benefits, while research (and academic scholarship) is typically more interested in a longer term view of things. Both are important but distinct questions. Please don't conflate the two points in this discussion.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure enough people actually read the article, though. Here's what the person proposing this change said:

 _> In my first ever AI class, we learned about how a system had been developed to automate something that had previously been a person's job. Everyone said, "Isn't this amazing?" — but I was concerned about who did these jobs. It stuck with me that no one else's ears perked up at the significant downside to this very cool invention._

Statements like that are frightening to me. It's incredibly hard to define "negative" in a reasonable way, and I guarantee you that someone else is going to define it in a way you don't like.

What's the negative impact of the recent discovery of a non-quantum recommendation algorithm on the field of quantum computing? Should the young researcher have spent time considering and detailing that?

<comment><USER13> > What's the negative impact of the recent discovery of a non-quantum > recommendation algorithm on the field of quantum computing? Should the young > researcher have spent time considering and detailing that?

If we consider the goal of research to improve society, then yes, I think it's reasonable to expect a researcher to spend some time considering whether what they're doing is going to actually improve society. In biology, most funding agencies require you to take a brief (~8-10 hours of class time) course on the responsible conduct of research, even if you aren't doing any human subjects research.

In the specific case you gave of the non-quantum recommendation algorithm, the negative impacts should be more or less the same as the impacts of the quantum algorithm, but with less of a barrier to entry. And even the person proposing this acknowledges: "We all agree it's hard and that we're going to miss tonnes of them, but even if we catch just 1% or 5%, it's worth it."

<comment><USER14> I think in the case mentioned, the implication is that advertisers would be better equipped to target us with ads – which is a fair point.

But why must we burden the theorists with ethics, and not the programmers or companies who bring that theory into the real world?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I get that they're trying to encourage ethical behavior, but this proposal seems incredibly arrogant. It implicitly states that computer programmers are, as a field, competent to predict how a technology will impact society. Whether or not ANY field is competent to do that is questionable, but whether or not computer programmers are able to do that is not questionable; it's clearly incorrect. We don't have the background, training, skillset, or in some cases even personality to be making insightful predictions about how society will respond to and be impacted by a new technology. I'm not saying the person advocating it is a bad person, but this particular proposal is arrogant (and founded on an incorrect understanding of what kind of thing programmers are good at).

<comment><USER15> They're not talking about computer programmers though (I agree they don't have the ability). The more interesting question is whether Computer Science (the academic discipline) should focus more on the societal impact of computing instead of solely on the technical implementation of computing (i.e. applied mathematics).

<comment><USER16> > They're not talking about computer programmers though (I agree they don't > have the ability).

This pigeon-holing was way beyond tiresome, not to mention grossly inaccurate, 20 years ago: please STOP IT. Computer programmers aren't in general some special class of person incapable of learning new skills and behaviours. Quite the opposite for the most part.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure I understand why you call this pigeon-holing. The GP explained that the professional field of programming has very little overlap with the professional field of social dynamics, and I was simply agreeing with that observation. "Most programmers don't know how society will evolve" appears to me a similar observation as "most pilots don't know how to build a plane". I don't really see why that's an objectionable statement.

<comment><USER17> This is, at its heart, a question of ethics in engineering disciplines.

Software engineering is a combination of applied mathematics, data science, and significant engineering practices (do X with Y constraints).

In Engineering proper, we have ethics classes. They entail in how things can fail and cause item, structural, and/or injury up to death.

We have all read about the Therac-25. That was a software and hardware design choice that lead to the death of many.

Computer science seems to skirt the ethics discussions just by being too new of a field. We (royal) aren't looking at the failure modes of having social media. Nor are we considering the ramifications of the code we write.

Intelligence is the ability to write the code. Wisdom is the ability to understand its ramifications.

<comment><USER18> From whence does this wisdom come? Experience by oneself, or learning of the experiences of others. How does one gain experience in, say, "having social media" if we've never had social media until the last few years? Social media hasn't been around long enough for a single complete human generation to have experienced life without it.

When MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, et al. were created, the "consequences" were providing an outlet for expression or keeping connected with friends and family. Noble causes. How do we get from there to "...and guess what, it'll be bad for individuals or society in $THIS_SPECIFIC_WAY"? I don't think it's possible.

Ethics evolve with society. Society will develop the ethics necessary to teach computer scientists and programmers. Such things are already underway[1].

Further, I'm seeing too little nuance in the comments on this story. Someone puts a Raspberry Pi in a situation to be responsible for human lives and it fails - is Linus now culpable?

1 - [https://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of- ethics](https://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics)

<comment><USER19> It doesn't take much study of history to see how cults form or the power of publishing anything you want as fact. Social media put the tools to do that in the hands of everyone.

I won't make a moral judgement on that decision but it is dangerously naive to think all technology has only positive externalities. The criticism of the current state of software engineering is that we don't consider those externalities.

"It's new and we didn't know what would happen" is a really shitty excuse to hear from an aerospace engineer after an airline crash.

<comment><USER20> A crash is the sort of outcome an aerospace engineering company should be able to predict. Celebrities burning huge quantities of aviation fuel on their way to and from conferences to pontificate about greenhouse gases isn't.

It's not clear to me that anyone can predict the consequences of technology even a few years into the future (much less the seventh generation that some folks talk about and that would, if adopted, bring progress to a halt), nor whether any elite should be trusted to decide whether to permit the adoption of some technology. (If you suggest the government, consider Trump and net neutrality.)

<comment><USER21> >It's not clear to me that anyone can predict the consequences of technology

That's the whole point of the article, no one person can ever figure that stuff out. That's why the public needs tone informed. No matter how educated (malicious or not) an "elite" is, they'll never be able to predict as much as the general public will.

Yet a wider public debate can.

Your example about greenhouse gases is a good example of this. Forget about the celebrities for a sec and look at the big picture:

The guys in the hydrocarbon industry were experts at their jobs: developing oil, coal & gas and selling those products. Likewise the car industry, experts at building and selling cars.

Their expertise is in building their particular products and selling them. They could not have been expected to understand the negative environmental effects. And moreover, it's in their interest to ignore the negatives associated with their products because it's much more profitable for them to produce cheap products that require little R&D.

It took insights from the general public outside those industries to realize how those products affect the population as a whole:

\- Burning hydrocarbons releases far more CO2 than the planet can scrub via the carbon cycle, which has lead to the greenhouse effect. Not only that but certain types of coal produce the smog that once blighted our cities and literally killed people with weak respiratory systems. Not only all of that but the lead that was added to gas to prevent engines knocking, kills people too.

\- Emmisions from cars not only add CO2 to the greenhouse effect but other car emissions such as carbon nanoparticles, Nitric Oxides, sulfuric compounds also result in measurable deaths among the populations living among those cars.

As a result, laws are passed to make cars release less emissions and also to reduce societal dependence on hydrocarbons. The public debate resulted in the population realizing that there are health hazards to both individuals in the short term and global climate in the long term, and resulted in laws being passed to reduce these health hazards as low as is possible right now.

Without informed public debate we'd never have realized that these negative effects occur and we'd never have saved as many lives as has been saved now that our cities are not drenched in lead and Nitric Oxide saturated smog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think this matters. To my knowledge, much of what would cause the negative social consequences isn't necessarily coming out of the academy, or up for peer review. Instead, it's coming from companies who handle massive amounts of data and aren't submitting their tecnology (in general) as a paper to a peer-review board, but as a product to market. While researchers for these companies can and do publish, the end goal is profit, not publication.

<comment><USER23> The more I think about it, the more I feel "Information Asymmetry" is the root cause of such problems.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's precedent here. Einstein notified the US President when it became clear as to the danger associated with, what were then, recent developments in high-energy particle physics. That allowed politicians, who would have had very little knowledge of physics, to do their job effectively according to the "new landscape" that such developments presented.

The mistake he made was that he _only_ alerted authorities. Which lead to atom bombs being developed in secret without any feedback from the public as to whether this was a direction that they supported.

What we need in 2018 and beyond is for current and future developers of new technologies to alert both authorities and the public so that politicians can legislate for that technology's use with public input as to what limits are deemed appropriate by the public at large.

The deep fakes example highlighted elsewhere in the thread is a perfect example of this. How can politicians legislate for this technology when they don't even know it exists? How can the public indicate to those same politicians that they feel that deep fake technology used to create revenge porn is something that the public wishes to be made illegal?

Laws, and society as a whole, are a feedback mechanism that rely on information. Those with that information have a moral obligation to alert the public to consequences that will affect them all.

<comment><USER24> > The mistake he made was that he only alerted authorities. Which lead to atom > bombs being developed in secret without any feedback from the public as to > whether this was a direction that they supported.

The risk there is that if you dithered the enemy could get it first.

If Pandora's box exists, there is only so much you can do to stop someone from opening it.

<comment><USER21> His disclosures were before the war. If the public had a chance to chip in, along with a public debate that would inevitably lead to our current MAD theory, then it's reasonable to imagine that the current "let's not go to war with each other anymore because MAD" might, even before WW2, have been "let's not go to war with each other anymore, or develop these expensive yet terrifying weapons, because MAD".

The key point is that without the public's input, politicians acting rationally, decided to direct their engineers & scientists (also acting rationally) to develop these weapons in secret, with everyone involved knowing that nukes were "extremely powerful" and "terrifying" and "war-ending" but not fully appreciating the whole MAD aspect that happens when your enemies play development catch up.

Tons of technologies today, while not as much of an instant threat to our civilization as nukes, are loaded with ethical concerns that current politicians and the public at large are just not aware of. Just reference the deep fakes saga for one recent example. There's currently no laws outlawing the use of deep fake techniques to produce revenge porn but there's every reason to believe that these techniques will be outlawed for such use in forthcoming legislation now that the public and politicians are aware of the risk. Extrapolate that to any number of innovations. With informed debate we can keep laws ahead of the game and prevent new techniques and technologies from being legally used for unethical purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Surely submitting technical papers for critical analysis before publication to ensure that problematic views are not given a platform or legitimized by institutions, and so that affected and marginalized communities are given more prominent equal representation, will help correct systemic injustices.

But sarcasm aside, a variation of the exact same quip could be made for a privacy and other assessments. I would argue that it is on other disciplines to keep up with what's going on in comp.sci to determine the impact of new findings on their fields, and for all STEM fields to be very careful not to invent administrative policing roles that can grant unmerited standing to arbitrary political interests.

If you are in privacy, you need to be on this. If you are in economics, political science, or equity fields, you would also need to be on this. Technology makes everyone necessarily more interdisciplinary, and instead of filtering out, they should be researching new developments that affect them.

</comment><comment><USER26> I like the intent behind this idea and think that it is important for ethics to start becoming part of Computer Science. I'd be curious if someone with more knowledge about medicine could explain how those publications handle these dilemmas. Especially with regards to CRISPR Cas9 as that is probably the most famous recent discovery that needs some serious ethical considerations.

My fear is that if Computer Science doesn't start acknowledging the ethical consequences of the work being done that it will lead to a sharp increase in regulations. This fear is primarily held with self driving cars which some seem to have been rushed into production and have lead to some serious consequences.

<comment><USER7> CRISPR doesn't really mean the ethical considerations have changed. It's just a tool that makes genomic changes easier (and the jury is still very much out whether it can do so safely). Other tools already existed to do this, just more expensive and more challenging to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> CS should take a few hints from more mature fields (I don't mean that pejoratively- it's just that it's a very recent field). In particular, let's look at what biology did once it was technically possibly to splice genes. A lot of biologists were terrified by what they believed the consequences of gene splicing were (anything from genetic social dystopias and superdiseases).

They gathered a bunch of data and had a meeting in Asilomar (a pretty conference center in the middle of nowhere on the CA coast). In addition to the scientists who actually had the technical ability to splice genes (~100 humans at that point had the requisite skills), some lawyers and philosophers also attended. They argued a bunch. And at the end of the day, they agreed on a voltunary moratorium on splicing, even though the argument for immediately, direct harm had not yet been made (precautionary principle).

Very reasonable predictions were made. Some of the more irresponsible claims were tamped down as being overly irrational. Some basic rules were applied on how to minimize collateral damage. Some strong rules were applied on disease- causing experiments.

It seems, looking back with the luxury of historical distance, that they chose wisely. It was probably because the level-headed people who focused on clear and present dangers, not absurd hypotheticals, managed to win the day.

Today, the logical conclusion of those decisions are just starting to be felt; we now have technology that permits us to make germ-line modifications (those are permanent, inherited changes), and we're starting to do actual trials with newly born children (this is, IMO, one of the most extraordinary moral and philosophical developments of my lifetime).

It's unclear to me whether CS has the same level-headed maturity that lead to this. Nor do I think people in CS can really predict the indirect outcomes of their technology. Instead, I think CS people have an obligation to push the technology as far as it can go within a community-determined set of boundaries, and report the direct implications thereof to the general public, who will then (indirectly through democratic mechanisms) create laws that restrict certain applications.

<comment><USER27> Most biologists are either in academic or government employed and do not need to even think about money/making a profit.

People working in CS are mostly in industry and do not have 10+ year timeframes to leisurely discuss ideas.

And what CS inventions are as impactful as atomic bombs (as someone mentioned above?) I cannot think of any CS inventions that warrant such extended ethical discussion.

The only exception would be computer scientists working on weapons in the defense industry. They should absolutely be held back by ethical concerns like this.

<comment><USER7> actually, the asilomar conference touched quite heavily on the rapidly burgeoning biotech industry.

I have a fair amount of expereince, being a biologist who did gene cloning who now works on large scale machine learning models.

TBH I can see a wide range of surveillance-related technologies enabled by CS that are as impactful (but not as explosively so) as atomic weapons (I think you actually mean ICBMs, since atomic weapons aren't an existential threat, while ICBMs are).

<comment><USER28> I suspect you may mean that ICBMs with atomic weapons are existential threats. Most people would not regard an ICBM equipped with a conventional explosive warhead as being capable of annihilating humanity.

If anything, this should hint at the difficulty of forecasting. The full impacts of some technologies cannot be understood without also knowing what they synergize with.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I mean ICBMs with atomic warheads.

That said, ICBMs with (conventional) thermobaric warhead could do a lot of damage- you could effectively take out a medium sized country's industrial sector in an hour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Computer Science is a much bigger field than it once was. There are many aspects where compsi is useful from a interdisciplinary point of view, and this imho, entails working with researchers from different specific areas.

You shouldn't expect a computer scientist to deeply understand sociological/psycological/philosophical questions, but they can and should to some degree identify where knowledge from other fields is important. My understanding is that they are not asking researchers to predict the future (although this is apparently what the interviewee imply), but simply identify that there might be (societal) consequences, good or bad.

This is why in areas like social robotics and HRI you will find more and more articles that are written by researches from different areas. E.g. a Computer Scientist and a Psychologist.

<comment> s-shellfish Expect of others? No.

But are such questions important? Very.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I considered a similar idea during my last conference, when a casual stroll through the poster session left me thinking "I could do a lot of damage with the papers in this room alone". A simple example: one poster about how to change people's behavior with peer pressure over social networks, and another one about how to detect depressed users. You could do a lot of damage combining those two.

Ethics is not CS' strong point. Adding a statement "this is why I think this research is ethical" doesn't seem like a bad place to start, if only because it would force researchers to actually consider what they are doing.

<comment><USER31> well, when you use technology to uncover problems, you open the door to both fixing them and exploiting them. knowledge is power, and power can be used for whatever you want. and yet no one is thinking about pulling kids out of schools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I get the intent, but at the same time, doesn't disclosing all potential negative consequences in the paper also provide a sort of guideline on how to weaponize their research as well?

Seems like a double edged sword, potentially making it easier to negatively utilize the research.

<comment><USER33> Sounds a lot like the "security through obscurity"-argument. I was never a fan of it. If we don't research and communicate the dangers, potential issues might slip! We need to be proactive in these things.

<comment><USER32> That's a good point. Security through obscurity doesn't prevent attacks, but may raise the bar of entry and delay a motivated attacker.

I imagine if all 3D printers were distributed with warning stickers saying that they can be used to print guns and knives that more people would try it than if it was less publicized.

Making it just a bit harder to discover the knowledge to weaponize something could give defensive researchers the time to build effective countermeasures.

<comment><USER21> That's why informed public debate is not about adding warning stickers to things, it's about creating competent laws that robustly protect the public.

In your example, the result shouldn't be warning stickers, it's laws specifically against building guns with your 3D printer. Or if right to weapons happens to be enshrined in your constitution, it's aboyt legal liability protocols being amended to take into account the fact that a perpetrator used a weapon that they built in their 3D printer as opposed to a regularly procured weapon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since we can't predict the societal consequences, no, no we shouldn't 'disclose' them.

Also, this isn't the job of peer review. Peer review is hard enough, let us focus on reviewing the technical details, since that's what matters.

<comment><USER21> There's precedent here. Einstein notified the US President when it became clear as to the danger associated with, what were then, recent developments in high-energy particle physics. That allowed politicians, who would have had very little knowledge of physics, to do their job effectively according to the "new landscape" that such developments presented.

The mistake he made was that he _only_ alerted authorities. Which lead to atom bombs being developed in secret without any feedback from the public as to whether this was a direction that they supported.

What we need in 2018 and beyond is for current and future developers of new technologies to alert both authorities and the public so that politicians can legislate for that technology's use with public input as to what limits are deemed appropriate by the public at large.

The deep fakes example highlighted elsewhere in the thread is a perfect example of this. How can politicians legislate for this technology when they don't even know it exists? How can the public indicate to those same politicians that they feel that deep fake technology used to create revenge porn is something that the public wishes to be made illegal?

Laws, and society as a whole, are a feedback mechanism that rely on information. Those with that information have a moral obligation to alert the public to consequences that will affect them.

<comment><USER7> Interesting point re: Einstein. However, I think what he did was literally to ensure that the US won the war, not disclose a societal consequence. Since that was an existential threat, it falls under different rules. Object detection is not an immediatel existential threat.

Also, I kind think the secrecy of the manhattan project was essential, and after carefully reading multiple histories, I am convinced that Leslie Groves was a genius who did more than a good job managing the project. If you look at how he declassified the project, they did everything right. THey had a historian with access to all the data. And scientists who understood the context. And they worked together to release as much information as they possibly could, and even helped make the case for transitioning control of weapons to civilians.

<comment><USER21> Of course they were all geniuses. And the project as a whole definitely was done in as ethical a way as possible. They weren't bad people and I'm not implying that they were.

But the point isn't anything to do with any of that. The point is that without the public's input, these weapons were developed and used in the very first place, without an informed debate to decide if this is how we want to conduct ourselves.

This kind of debate was as common back then as it is today and back then it lead to chemical weapons being banned after WW1 by the UN with the support of pretty much every country.

And since then, for the few years that the US was the only one with nukes, if not for the extreme restraint practiced by the higher ups, they might have happily used nukes more times (at the time, there was huge pressure to just nuke north Korea to end the Korean War).

Once it became clear that the "enemies" will catch up in the development race meaning that any future war would be nuclear, the public debate clarified very quickly upon the current philosophy: MAD is the only outcome in a nuclear war.

If this debate had been allowed to be fully conducted in an open and informed manner before nukes were developed, we might live in a world where nukes were outlawed at UN level in the same way that chemical warfare was, long before they were even developed in the first place.

Extrapolate that thought to aggressive data-gathering & storage by social media sites, genomic information ancestry services, tracking technologies and techniques developed in the name of marketing, facial recognition technologies by security firms, Three-Letter agencies recording and monitoring every web user's actions, profiling techniques to identify depressed users etc etc etc. Right now laws are not robustly protecting the public from misuse of these technologies. In fact, a lot of the misuse of the above technologies is directly due to the fact that the politicians know that they've got a powerful technology at hand and decide to develop it. And when informed public debate happens, when the negative outcomes of misuse of these techniques becomes so obvious to the public at large that they demand political action en masse, laws with more robust protections for the public's data will be forthcoming in future updates. But those are the technologies that we know about. (At least, we nerds!). What is currently in development that has similar potential to be weaponized or misused that none of us know about yet?

<comment><USER7> I gotta say, ultimately, I support nation-states who develop weapons to address existential threats in secret.

I do so because I think any nation which doesn't do so will be replaced by one that does, and surviving is better.

By the way, I've already kind of gone through these sorts of thought experiments, and voted with my genome: I open sourced the data in my genome voluntarily ([https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu80855C](https://my.pgp- hms.org/profile/hu80855C)) because I don't really ascribe to the "grim meathook future" scenarios you're describing.

In general I think informed public debate is great, but in the specific case of the Manhattan Project, I really don't think having an informed public debate during the war was even a remote possibility.

<comment><USER21> Einstein alerted the authorities about the dangers on Aug 2nd, a month before the war had even started and long before the US had joined the fight.

But the authorities kept it secret, choosing to develop these weapons.

But, had those weapons not been developed in secret and an informed public debate occurred before development, that debate would have inevitably lead to the MAD doctrine. That is the only inevitable outcome of nuclear war.

Without the guidance that MAD provides, politicians in 1939 did what they thought was the rational choice, and chose to develop these weapons so that they weren't left unprepared if the enemy developed their nukes. But with the knowledge that MAD is the only outcome in a post nuke world, totally different scenarios become possible. They may have chosen to take action at UN-level, anti-nuclear proliferation treaties even before they got developed? Stifling the public debate just delayed the notion of anti-nuclear proliferation treaties but it did not stop them. The only result of an informed public debate on nukes is anti-nuclear proliferation treaties.

If all that had been done in 1939 as opposed to the 50's & 60's, the war could have been prevented before it even began!

Regardless of the crazy whataboutery, the lesson is that the public debate resulted in the ethics being decided as: "nuclear technology leads to MAD when used to create weapons, therefore laws are needed to protect the public from misuse of nuclear technology". This debate is needed for every new technology.

Technology moves fast, faster than ever these days. And currently, we're used to a situation where we typically operate these debates retroactively, legislating against misuse after the fact, when new technologies are created and then misused. Whereas, as this article is highlighting, the ethical way of doing things would be: to have informed public debates that allow laws to be created to robustly protect the public before a new technology is misused.

Note that nobody is accusing "new technologies" as bad. Or evil. Or anything like that. The call is simply for creators to slow this public debate to take place openly, to decide if the new technology can be misused and its repercussions in the event of that misuse and if new laws are needed to protect the public, before the possibility of their new technology being misused is even a factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Compsci researchers arent the best people for predicting societal impacts of technology. It is a different skillset. People are not anywhere as predictable as machines. You need focus groups, blind studies, and linguists to build your survey questions. And you need the patience to work with people who really dont care to learn anything about technology. Many a predicted revolution has been laughed away once the non-techs had their say.

Google glass.

<comment><USER35> I'm pretty sure the people at Facebook fully understand what they were doing when they gamed the ux to get people addicted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Thinking back to my time in grad school, I feel that the list of things I would have come up with as negative societal consequences would have at least outed my political opinions and at worst made me look paranoid. You could greatly mitigate the political aspect by not attaching a value judgement to which foreseeable societal consequences should be disclosed. You might be able to mitigate the second effect by having some guidelines about likelihood and how long-term the consequences need to be.

Over time, people will probably turn this task into copying and pasting a standard list for their research area. Existing researchers still mostly won't have to think about societal impact, but maybe it'll have an effect on which research areas people choose to work in.

</comment><comment><USER37> What is a negative social consequence? In the interview e.g. the 'destruction' of jobs through automation is given as an example. I personally do not agree that this is a negative. Freeing people from forced labor and allowing them to have other pursuits I see as truly positive. The fact that we maintain an unsustainable socioeconomic system in which one's right to live is tied directly to one's role in a planet destroying economic production system is the real problem.

</comment><comment><USER38> What are 'negative social consequences' ? That seems like a value-judgement to me and potentially highly political.

</comment><comment><USER39> A more reasonable thing to do is to form a council of computer scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, politicians, and people otherwise capable of having a useful opinion in the matter.

That council would then have the task of reviewing new technologies and their potential impacts. The council may then have different subgroups each discussing a certain technology, or possibly each with a certain specific task such as: reviewing research papers, watching the developments inside companies, writing legal propositions, etc...

This council could then be under a government agency, or better yet, an NGO that can get funding by the government, from donations, universities, etc...

What would you think about that?

<comment><USER21> Absolutely not!

A council, no matter how large, is, relative to the general public as a whole, made up of a small number of individuals.

Such a council would raise so many ethical concerns, such as: Who are these individuals? Why are they on the council? What are their biases? What does their livelihoods ultimately depend on? What conflicts of interest do they have? Among hundreds of other questions.

Only an informed debate among the general public can lead to laws that robustly protect the public at large because vested interests get drowned out by informed dissent from other, equally-qualified, voices who are not affected by such vested interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Since most people seem to be missing some context and commenting about the headline, just be aware that the proposal is smaller. Most papers have a section that essentially says "This work is important because of XYZ. It will enable better ABC." They already talk about societal and technical consequences, that's nothing new. The proposal is to not sweep the bad bits under the rug and be as rigorous in that section as in the rest of the paper. It seems fair. If you want to hype why your work is high impact, then you have to be honest about the anticipated impact.

</comment><comment> s-shellfish This article is not about what could happen in the future.

This article is about what does happen now, and is stigmatized against being disclosed due of fear of personal reprecussions.

That was never the point of academia. These institutions exist with all their rules and regulations precisely because to discover and uncover, one must not be afraid of how it will affect oneself from keeping a roof over one's head.

Presently, this article is being severely misinterpreted.

</comment><comment><USER41> There was a story on public radio recently (maybe Radio Lab?) about synthesizing voice. Adobe has developed a "Photoshop for audio". One of the hosts interviewed a computer scientist on the subject and really pressed on the ethical uses of such software. The scientist was flummoxed and had not really considered the ethical implications before. I would not be surprised if scientists do not consider how their research could affect society.

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/11/adobe...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/11/adobe-voco-photoshop-for-audio-speech-editing/)

[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/breaking- news](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/breaking-news)

</comment><comment><USER42> It is absolutely nonsensical to think that someone who creates a thing should be held responsible for every negative use or misuse of what they create. It's even more nonsensical to expect someone to come up with every single one of these scenarios that could possibly happen. It's just not realistic, doable or even helpful. At best, it will have an extensively negative effect as every single new development will be tut-tutted into the shadows by a group of hand- wringers, terrified of a user 7 sigmas away from the mean might do with it one day. This is an appalling way to construct a society, let alone a discipline that requires rapid, ground-breaking iteration.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think a lot of the HN community seems themselves too much like grand inventors. Prometheus bringing fire down from the mountain ignorant of the future of war, gun powder, and bombs.

My career in technology has taught me its a lot more obvious. When your marketing team start buying massive collected data, or your sales team starts selling ad data to 3rd parties. We know things happen, and the grey morality of it. Yet we turn our backs to it.

The reason I think HN is so quick to jump on these topics is because if we search ourselves we see that our morals rarely stand up to our self-proclaimed ideals. Jobs are sometimes hard to find, stability is nice, and dying on that hill doesn't always seem important.

Those are negative societal consequences we are most dishonest about it. Not Promethean illusions of grandeur.

</comment><comment><USER44> This a tough one, since researchers don't control how their technology is used.

And it's very difficult for even the experts to balance the positives against the negatives: facial recognition could be used to find a serial killer ... or a missing child.

As one example, RMS has long advocated against the "ethics" of certain technologies and companies, while Emacs and GCC have greatly accelerated the adoption of technology, generally. And those tools have almost certainly been used directly or indirectly to build some very, very bad things.

</comment><comment><USER45> There used to be an organization called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility CPSR. It grew out of Xerox Parc. I just looked at their web site and they don't seem as active anymore.

</comment><comment><USER46> Warning: this sorting algorithm may lead to the proliferation of facism.

</comment><comment><USER47> I see this as a natural extension to the "Threats" section. In comp sci (esp software engineering) conference papers are required to have a "Threats to Validity" section to address the reproducibility and generalisability concerns. NSF needs proposals to describe the broader societal impacts but it's typically to answer the question of — how will this research positively impact society? But I've rarely seen it being used for negative societal consequences..

</comment><comment><USER48> The ethics of a technology dont' have to be so lofty. It's a real kick in the happiness meter when some code you have written puts ppl out of work. At this stage in my career, I actively make arguments of why I (we) shouldn't do something avoiding the intent of reducing labour costs.

<comment><USER49> But basically the whole point of doing something in software is to automate things that are labor intensive. If you're avoiding things that save work you're not doing your job as a software engineer correctly.

It's kind of like using an Ox in modern farming because you want more farmers to have work. You wouldn't do that because your farming business (barring some great marketing that lets you recoup the costs) would just go bankrupt quickly.

<comment><USER50> > But basically the whole point of doing something in software is to automate > things that are labor intensive.

I see where you're coming from but that's quite an oversimplification, don't you think? Software that drives a computer's graphic card, for example, which in turn gets used to run software that enables a physician to explore a 3D MRI, are just two examples of tasks that do not consist of automating manual labour.

(You could probably pay a lot of painters to paint a lot of pictures but hooking them up to the MRI might be a little difficult).

There's a lot of software that achieves _new_ things, rather than old and well-known things really fast and without involving hands or a human brain.

I prefer to avoid discussing ethics on forums like HN, so I won't comment on whether or not working on software that puts people out of work is "the right thing to do" \-- suffice to say that, if you wish to avoid doing that, there's plenty of room to do it while still doing your job as a software engineer.

<comment><USER51> > There's a lot of software that achieves new things

Precisely. And the only way those new things are thought up is if someone has the time to dedicate to the task. If that person instead has to spend 12 hours a day foraging for berries just to stay alive, then they won't have time to build 3D MRI code.

The gains to productivity brought about by mechanical -- and now digital -- automation have lifted billions out of poverty and extended their lifespans by decades. I agree with GP that the only purpose for software is to automate a human task. Lucky for us, software is doing things that humans can't do at all (or would take years of effort, in the case of your MRI picture).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Should Nature disclose negative societal consequences (real, and present, not predicted)?

It's not like CS researchers are the ones turning science into a dumpster fire to sustain 30% profit margins.

Most of the more hysterical screeching about AI, automation, etc is reminiscent of buggy whip manufacturers bitching about cars.

<comment><USER21> That attitude is what turns non-nerds away from asking our opinion on the technologies that we develop.

If you don't want to be involved in the debates about AI, automation et al, then you can't really comment on those who do. If you do want to chip in, inform the public about the realistic dangers. What they need is realistic information from experts so that they can deduce what risks are acceptable and what risks are unacceptable.

Even the most untechnically-informed member of the public will get the positives: AI, automation, (or whatever technology you're developing) makes software better in someway, doesn't even matter how or why, it's taken for granted that you're developing something that you believe will be a net- positive.

But it's the negatives that are what needs to be legislated for. Regulations and laws don't give technologies a pat on the back, they protect the public from misuse of a technology. Your voice would be welcomed.

<comment><USER52> Automation will destroy certain jobs (as did cars for buggy whips). What pisses me off (and I believe ought to piss off others) is the monetizing of these types of works behind paywalls (as Nature and Science, the journals, are wont to do) when public access to the primary sources would help inform debate.

Reading tarted-up flag-planting arXiv papers can be tough going even for practicioners, to say nothing of the general public. But ultimately the general public will have to vote on propositions, or vote in representatives, to pass sensible (not hysterical) regulations.

For example, after an Uber lidar-equipped vehicle killed a Phoenix jaywalker (a separate part of law that I do not like, but acknowledges physics and shitty drivers), Uber halted testing in most markets. This is sensible based on public reaction, but three major problems compounded to take Elaine Herzberg's life:

1) the lidar did not function as designed, 2) the backup driver did not function as instructed, and 3) Ms Herzberg did not obey the law.

This is a situation where the facts eventually became clear, and still it is difficult to say that one side or the other overreacted (personally I think Uber did the right thing PR-wise, but I also worry that less testing means slower progress towards safer cars, since human drivers are legendarily shitty and much less safe than conservative self-driving cars with functional lidar).

Now let's consider more complicated problems, such as replacing medicinal chemists with reinforcement learning systems, or China's AI approach to "social credits". Both have potential benefits and huge potential drawbacks, and both are relatively easy to grasp compared to some thornier cases. One is purposely obscured due to a dictatorial regime; one is obscured not by administrative fiat but by copyright law and a very silly tradition in academic and quasi-academic research. Hiding results in paywalled "prestige" journals rather than making it available to the general public is seen as a mark of distinction (and avoiding a $30k-$50k open access charge is just sensible conservation of research funds, in this scenario. I know because I am an academic and I personally think OA charges are a waste, though for different reasons.)

Anyone who wants to [break the law] can obtain the primary documents in the former case via sci-hub. That's just a fact. But is this any more reasonable than Georgia allowing companies to charge for access to state laws? Is it reasonable for people to pay twice, in most cases, first for the research* and then for the report, when faster dissemination of primary sources can directly inform debate over some important issues?

It seems silly that we would have a system where others are expected to pay for, digest, and opine upon research done by the primary authors. It would not be necessary if the norm was to disseminate AI breakthroughs in a format like distill.pub, where the whole point is to explain both the results and their context. But until academic and quasi-academic researchers can kick the "prestige" habit, that's unlikely to happen, and the public will be left to listen to pundits (often idiots) rather than forming their own well-informed opinions, and that sucks.

No time to edit, but hopefully you get the idea. Disclaimer: I am an academic, applying "AI" to medical care for children with rare and deadly diseases; I used to work at GOOG a million years ago; and what I see among the worst hucksters sickens me, because I think it's going to kill people in spite of better competing ideas that could improve the human condition. I'm just one person with one vote. I'd like everyone else to form their own opinions, because theay might change mine. Thus primary sources are critical.

* anyone who does not believe that taxpayers subsidize industrial & corporate r&d via tax credits and incentives is quite naive; it is not different from academic competition in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Negative by what metric? And how on earth is a computing scientist supposed to know the social consequences of his work, good or bad?

Doing this would just be feel-good virtue signaling nonsense that would reduce the overall quality of the literature.

</comment><comment><USER51> "Societal consequences" are an emergent phenomenon. By definition, they are impossible to predict.

Often, the consequences of some new technology are both good and bad.

<comment><USER54> That's not really part of the definition of emergent phenomenon. Yeah yeah, you can't predict everything. But you don't need to be a visionary or defeat the rules of complexity science to predict the NSA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> This way scientists can create a road map for ethically challenged CEOs and VCs. So, that they can get the most profit out of the technology.

</comment><comment><USER56> So, just to be clear, the HN gestalt is that economists generally don't understand anything because "homo econimus" is a fiction and they don't understand the impacts of even relatively simple-to-characterize policy changes due to the complexity of a society made up of irrational actors, _but_ it is reasonable to expect computer scientists to correctly predict the impact of their prospective research whose practical applications may not yet even be a gleam in anybody's eye, and decide on that basis what should and should not be researched and/or published and/or written?

The solution to this conundrum is obvious: Take the computer scientists who can make these amazing predictions and move them into the field of economics, where their predictive power can generally do more good for society. Then they won't invent anything harmful _and_ can do trillions of dollars of good for the world economy, which is way better than all but the most black swan-y of research projects they could have come up with.

I'd also observe, HN gestalt, that you believe that pure research should be pursued because it is unpredictable where advances will end up being useful. This contradicts the idea that researchers can guess the societal impacts of their research. If researchers can successfully guess the societal impacts of their research, then people _are_ justified in cutting pure research whenever they decide it's useless, because the judgment process that led to the conclusion "this is useless" is the exact same judgment process you're asking researchers to do here. Accepting that these predictions can be made will rather quickly result in the elimination of pure research. (Because, pretty much by definition, it looks useless for the forseeable future.)

If you want to decide this is a good idea and incorporate it into your worldview, you're going to have to give up several other things to get there. And have a frankly irrational view of the predictability of the universe, in my view.

You can't even really escape from this by saying "But it's so obvious in some cases that research is bad", because it really never is. Even germ warfare research can lead to valuable medical insights, and you really never know what valuable medical insights will lead to something that helps germ warfare. The idea that researchers can predict the future and should exercise some social responsibility by doing so is not some sort of major moral advancement; it's a childish regression from something we figured out decades ago, demonstrating our further scientific decay.

(The other inevitable objection is probably around nuclear bombs. Had the Manhatten Project never existed, there is no world in which we'd be sitting here in 2018 with no nuclear bombs. The only change would be who had them when. Nuclear bombs do not exist because of man's hubris and disregard for consequences. They exist because _the laws of the universe permit them_.)

<comment><USER57> > economists generally don't understand anything

I think this is taking hyperbole literally. The world is not at all completely unpredictable; it's highly susceptible to reason and science - in a way, that's the entire enterprise of the Enlightenment and its child, science. Predictions aren't perfect, but they are hardly useless. Your world is built on them; your alarm will go off; the train will be roughly on time and won't collide with other trains; investors invest based on economic and business predictions; software developers develop based on market predictions and predictions of user psychology; we can predict how well UI's will work, hardware failure rates, etc. The list goes on forever.

In particular, economics has provided, especially since WWII, a period of economic growth that is orders of magnitude beyond what humanity ever experienced before. Depressions used to be a regular occurrence; they have stopped. Systemic bank failures no longer happen, we know how money supply works, and the impacts of various policies much better than throwing darts at a graph. Recessions are not as bad; sustained growth is a norm, which is a miracle. The growth of the world economy, lifting billions out of poverty for the first time in history, is beyond all but the most visionary dreams of a century ago.

Do economists and economics get it wrong sometimes and to varying degrees? Absolutely. Unfortunately, there is nothing perfect in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> "Should investors disclose negative social consequences?"

</comment><comment><USER59> The fact that the article says that "oil and tobacco" are the Bad Industries (that CS shouldn't become like) says everything you need to know. There is no CS without oil.

</comment><comment><USER60> Isn't this exactly what Google Cloud, EC2, etc are? i.e., Google and Amazon selling access to their internal infrastructure, or something closely resembling it?

</comment><comment><USER61> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER62> I guess I can write down a list of wild-ass guesses of potential things that might happen if you use my software on the readme.md.

</comment><comment><USER63> Phillip Rogaway gave an interesting invited talk [1] (and an accompanying essay [2]) on a related topic at a cryptography conference in 2015. It is quite an entertaining read, even if you are not a cryptographer.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-XebcVSyJw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-XebcVSyJw)

[2] [http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html](http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html)</comment>


Why is Google Discontinuing my Favorite Google Product? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2008/07/why-is-google-discontiuing-my-favorite-google-product.html

<comment><USER2> Most likely management have deemed the product to not be making enough money (or instrumental in making money) for it to be included in corporate strategy. Also, the developers have probably tired of it so won't continue it in their free time. Be grateful it is open-source!

</comment><comment><USER3> Thats a big win that they open sourced it!

I don't know that it was a money issue. I feel like many of their products don't have a business model, per se. I just feel like it wasn't important enough to have developer cycles spent on it.</comment>


Alexis Ohanian, reddit's co-founder, has returned as an advisor - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reddit.com/2011/04/good-news-everyone.html

<comment><USER2> So, what I find more interesting in this is that Reddit did bring in a "new" general manager.

What worries me is that it's not actually someone new. Neither is Alexis, for that matter.

From the outside looking in it would appear that while Reddit has been great at building a community, ramping up page views and engagement ... they suck at making money. (And this has limited their ability to hire and has spread the existing team very thinly.) From from what I can tell, they've always sucked at making money. So by promoting their community manager and bringing back the original CEO as an advisor, it would seem that this would enhance the parts that they're already really good at, but will they be willing to stir things up enough to bump up the revenues (even if it pisses the community off some)? In an armchair-quarterbacking sort of way, I'd hoped they'd bring in someone that was more of an outsider.

<comment><USER3> They've been doing fine for money since they brought in reddit gold. The problem with hiring new staff had to do less with their revenue and more with Conde Nast's print-centric internal structure. That's why reddit gold worked out so well for them: they counted as "paid subscribers", which meant that reddit could get more money allocated for staff. Before, they had rarely had a problem getting servers or other infrastructure, but get approved to hire people to run them was difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good for him. Alexis is a genuinely nice guy. When I launched The Startup Foundry, Alexis emailed me two days after I launched (when I still didnt have much traction) and offered his support. I've had the privilege to interview him in a couple different occasions since then and he's always been incredibly kind.

He's a real standup guy.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome. From the things I've seen Alexis do, he seems like a genuinely cool person, and it really makes me happy seeing people like him succeed at things (advisor to Conde Nast seems like a pretty serious position).

Congrats, man.

<comment><USER6> Thank you! It's not nearly as awesome for reddit as Erik becoming GM or Max joining the team, but I'm happy to have the chance to give input into the future of reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Chromakode is a JavaScript badass. If you have a chance to listen to his talk on generating dynamic audio in HTML5, you definitely should attend.

</comment><comment><USER8> Down-to-earth cool guy. Reddit owes a lot of what it is to him. I can't see how the community won't benefit from this. Congrats Alexis.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, but I hope no one catches on to all these shill accounts of mine ;)

<comment><USER8> Winking at a shill account is pretty meta. Your shill calling you on it is even more meta.

Whoa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Time to update the Alexis Tracker 3000:

        - YC ambassador to the East
        - hip hipmunk
        - returning to reddit as advisor/doodler
          - (moving back to SF full-time?  part-time?)
        - advising conde nast
        - publishing books/magnets/sauce/posters/shirts for charity
        - talking talks

How much did I miss? I know more about your life than my own.

<comment><USER6> I'm not moving, Erik (hueypriest) Martin is.

Everything else in your tracker is right on :)

I'm bummed this is such a story, though, because the real story is Erik's promotion (congrats, dude!) and Max (chromakode) joining the team. He's been a longtime code contributor (socialite) and active redditor for even longer (he also donates time to help breadpig, building stuff like WTFCNN.com for me).

I was simply asked by Conde to formally advise them from time to time about reddit & their general web strategy (and possibly consult on future mascots for new web properties). The chance to have some input on my baby was hard to pass up, but this is not even a part-time gig -- managing and growing the hipmunk brand & community is my fulltime commitment.

<comment><USER3> What exactly will Erik's new duties as GM entail? How does it differ from what he and Jeremy already do?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hoping for the best, but based on some of my own experience, these things rarely work. You can't go home again.

<comment><USER6> I can't stress enough that I'm just a formal advisor now. I was already informally doing it whenever someone asked me to. The exciting story here is Erik moving out west to GM and Max joining (and bringing those UX skills).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sweet! This can only be a good thing. Alexis is awesome (as evidenced by him talking to us for 30 min at 1am for our YC pre-interview.)

<comment><USER6> Thanks, but that's a perfectly normal thing to do at 1am.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how that happened. Sounds very Jobsian... Very cool, glad to hear it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Alexis is truly awesome. I'm sure he will be a huge help for CondeNast</comment>


Hodor Keyboard - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.richapps.hodorkeyboard.app

<comment><USER2> The fact that this has made over $50 in a day makes me question what I've been doing with my life. Hodor.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit That is pretty funny. But not $1 of funny.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hodor!</comment>


Ask HN: If company starts to do stuff only to drive metrics, is it time to go? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It depends if the metric is cash in the door or not.</comment>


How politics makes us stupid - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid <comment><USER2> "Kahan compares the HPV debacle to the relatively smooth rollout of the hepatitis B vaccine...."

The following premise assumes that the HPV vaccine _s_ (emphasize plural) consumption was lesser than the HepB vaccine because patients were ignorant and/or it was mismarketed.

It does not consider that consumers may have been _more_ intelligent than they give credit for and didn't jump to each vaccine as it was released because they didn't fall for its planned-obsolescence business model or marketing. Those parents who _did_ fall for the marketing would have proceeded thus:

1) inject their child(ren) with the three-vaccine series of Cervarix over a 12-month span. This protects against two HPV strains.

2) Then Gardasil comes out, which protects against two additional strains. Again, 3 doses over a 12-month span.

3) THEN, Gardasil 9 comes out, which adds 5 more strains. Again, 3 doses over a 6-8 month period.

So, at this point, a parent with full buy-in to the concept has had administered 9 different HSV vaccine dosings. Yet, there are still more HPV types that are not addressed in any of these vaccines, and the recipient is not protected from any other STD.</comment>


Tir 0.9 Is Out, Hype.la Open Sourced - <AUTHOR> http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1294605882.html <comment><USER2> Say what you want about Zed but his output is phenomenal. Every few weeks a new post comes out and so does a new addition to our industry. This guy is great, someone I definitely look up to.

</comment><comment><USER3> for those of you who aren't omniscient:

Tir is an experimental web framework for the Mongrel2 webserver and Lua programming language.

Hype.la is a simple way to promote your art, music, etc. with other like- minded artists by trading small promotional blurbs. (ad network)

</comment><comment><USER4> With the common complaints about the various dynamic languages of choice being slow, I don't understand why Lua hasn't gotten more attention. The standard interpreter is many times faster than Ruby and Python, and LuaJIT is several times faster still. It's also an elegant language with a tiny core. I wish it had implicit returns, but nothing's perfect.

<comment><USER5> > The standard interpreter is many times faster than Ruby and Python

[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming- lang...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-languages- are-fastest.php)

No it's not "many times faster". Standard Lua is just a little faster than CPython.

LuaJIT2 kicks everyone's ass, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The dude just doesn't stop. Not only does he create top notch software but he's got the excellent documentation to go along with it as well so pretty much anyone can pick up the stuff and use it.</comment>


Show HN: The Found a Business Book – Interviews with Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.foundabusiness.com <comment><USER2> Pros:

      - about half the interviewees are HN regulars
      - the other half look very interesting as well
      - nice sample chapter
      - DRM-free pdf
      - one good idea can from this can change everything
      - a thumbs-up from Dan Shipper
      - supports & encourages a young member of this community
      - re-confirms that the good/inspriring on HN outweighs the negative

Cons:

      - data inside may be free elsewhere

The Pros win. I'm buying it. Thank you, Jack.

<comment><USER3> _\- data inside may be free elsewhere_

I thought about that too, but then realized that even though some (maybe many) of these people have published interviews "out there" for free, each interview stands to hit on some unique insight or thought that a previous one missed. Given all the other "pros" you mentioned above, especially

 _\- supports & encourages a young member of this community_

I had no trouble deciding to buy a copy.

I just wish I'd been this motivated when I was in High School. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for your kind words and for buying a copy of the book! Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Worth noting that the guy who wrote this is 17 and still in high school. Pretty impressive stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Dan! I really appreciate it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting landing page. The choice of three <h1> feels weird. You usually go from <h1> to <h3> for the sub-headlines. The <h1> being the main _hook_. I would actually move your second headline ("Do you wish you could learn about business from some of the world's best entrepreneurs?") to the top, and then move the other ones to <h3> tags.Adding a picture of the book cover to the page usually helps sales due to how connects the price to a "tangible" product (even if its not). Make the free sample offer more noticeable. I did not see it the first three times I browsed the page. Tip: use a different color other than blue. The call to action button also washes away in the theme. Since you are using bootstrap, test using the btn-danger class (which makes it yellow), and change the button font color to black or dark grey. The page background should be a bit lighter to ease readability. Maybe use a light pattern from subtlepatterns.com. Instead of using italics in the second sub-headline ("Then The Found a Business Book is for you.") test changing the font color to a dark red. It tends to improve how much of the page people read.

Still, a very good start. Much better than most startups out there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for all of this feedback regarding the design of the site. I'll definitely be sure to incorporate some of this feedback when updating the site!

<comment><USER5> Given that you are currently getting lots of traffic, the best time to test is right now. A .5% improvement could translate into quite a good amount of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone! I'm the creator of The Found a Business Book. I'll be around for a while to answer questions if you have any!

<comment><USER6> Hey there. The book looks pretty impressive! I'd really get someone to do at least a little bit of design on the landing page though.

There are mostly just basic typography and spacing issues, but it can make a big difference in how professional your presentation looks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback and kind words! I agree that the landing page needs improvement, and that's something I hope to work on soon!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These entrepreneurs are great, but they all look like they do web stuff only.

The only thing I think about when I see this is: "The facebooks are great, but what about the Maersks"

Kudos to you creating something, but maybe the title is a bit too ambitious. The fact that you are 17 and have done this is commendable, but I strongly recommend that you reach out and try to get exposure to the entrepreneurs who build physical product innovations.

Best of luck champ.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the feedback! My plan is to add more entrepreneurs to the book in the future, and I will definitely try to add people who have created physical products.

<comment><USER7> Godspeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Books like this should really offer a money back guarantee.

Why? It signals quality and enables speculative purchasing.

The quality signal I think is obvious.

The speculative purchasing is an incremental sale. Emotionally, I'm not going to purchase this book without a guarantee unless I've decided to commit time to read it. However, with a guarantee I can buy it on the chance that I might read it. It's not logical, I know, but it is how customers work emotionally.

Also, economically your guarantee is basically free. 99% of the time its not worth my time to request the refund even if I don't like the book. The 1% is if your book has made me emotionally angry due to its poor content (1 book I've ever read).

But, people will game the system? No they won't. At least not in sufficient volume to make it worth worrying about. If I want to scam a free copy of your book, it's likely I can find a pirated version faster than I can get my wallet and enter my credit card number.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I don't get the downvotes. I guess this comment goes against the spirit of congratulations and encouragement in the rest of the thread.

Sure, money back guarantees work for lots of products. The late-night infomercials have proven that. And they work because they influence buying (it's no risk!) but don't cause too many returns in reality. Irrational human behavior.

But for $15, it's a really low investment for most people. If the price were a lot higher (even $40), it might be worth needing to offer a money back guarantee.

Does Starbucks offer money back guarantee on your coffee? If you drink the whole thing and didn't enjoy it, they'll give you a full refund? No. It's not for everything.

<comment><USER8> Money back guarantees are better for the consumers and better for the producers. There's still psychology involved at $15, and more than anything it's to mitigate loss aversion. If I spend $15 and the product sucks, I loose a lot more than $15 worth of happiness.

Its fine if these guys don't like the advice.

And, yes, Starbucks does offer money back guarantees, usually at the rate of "this one's free and so is the next one."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems there is only a PDF version? I'd suggest to add an epub and/or mobi version: Much easier/better to use on mobile devices and tablets. Of course, it is possible to convert a non-DRM PDF for customers, but it's a hassle. Moreover, you could think about publishing on bigger platforms (Amazon, Apple, Smashwords or even Leanpub) as well: that might increase reach. Perhaps lower the price to 9.95$ in that process - that way you'd get 70% from every sales through KDP (35% else).

</comment><comment><USER11> Bought,

will read it on the train on Monday. Excellent timing since I just finished reading all the interviews in "Founders at Work" that were on my most interesting list.

I saw that I used Gumroad to pay for it and Sahil is interviewed in the book. I think I'll read that one first :D

Edit: Small piece of advice: Imo it looks better and is easier to scan if single points actually have some sort of bullet or similar. This goes for the landing page (you'll learn X,Y,Z) as well as for the table of contents of the actual book :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for buying the book! I think your feedback regarding the landing page design and the design of the table of contents is great, and I will definitely incorporate it soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I started something similar with www.founders.cc (launches May 1)!

I'll definitely be buying this one as well. Looks like a solid list of entrepreneurs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Ryan! I saw founders.cc on Twitter a while back. I'm looking forward to buying your book as well! I think you're doing great work.

<comment><USER12> Awesome! You should shoot me an email. I'd love to discuss both books.

DMd the email to you earlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This book looks genuinely compelling, and is the first "HN books" in which I've been truly interested for quite some time. Alas, the price is too steep for me, and, were I in a position to buy it, this book would likely sit dormant in my queue of unread books for months if not years. Still, good luck.

(As an aside, the website is downright unusable on mobile.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Feel free to email me at firstname.lastname@example.com and I would be more than happy to work something out if you want to read it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I was a teenager I was interviewing bands with a tape recorder and printing the interesting parts in photocopied fanzines we would give away for free at shows and record stores. Nowadays kids interview CEOs via email and charge $15 to download a PDF of their responses. The times they are a changing.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd like to buy, but ... in the spirit of only pursuing immediately-relevant and -actionable information, is there anything in here about outsourcing, and lessening the time expended on repetitive tasks? 4HWW-type material?

Cheers!

<comment><USER16> Have you read Rob Walling's Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guid to Launching a Startup? Quick read, lots of good info on exactly what you're looking for: [http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers- ebook/dp/B...](http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers- ebook/dp/B003YH9MMI)

<comment><USER15> Thanks so much for the heads up :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I just bought the book! Working on something very similar (www.Disruptorsbook.com) but we both have featured different entrepreneurs and different angles. Would love to talk sometime!

</comment><comment><USER18> Purchased, thanks for putting all these great opinions in one place. looking forward to the read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for purchasing the book! Please feel free to let me know if you have any comments or questions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Purchased. Great job putting this together. Looking forward to the read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for buying the book! Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or comments!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Bought. Nice job, looks really interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for buying it! Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions or comments!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> by chance, was this inspired by Mixergy?

Purchased.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not a member of Mixergy, but I think all of the work Andrew has done with Mixergy has been great! This was in part inspired by Mixergy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks like a lot of value here, and congratulations to the author / editor for shipping! One niggle though: no audio format (and if there is I didn't see it).

Anecdotally, I saw noticeable jump in sales to my eBook No Budget Budget: <https://leanpub.com/nobudgetbudget> when I added an audio book with it. Some people either don't like to read or don't have the time.

Something to consider.</comment>


The Lost Children of Ireland - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/28/world/europe/tuam-ireland-babies-children.html <comment><USER2> If there's one minute fraction of a good thing to come out of this it's generational change that is now both ignoring and wrestling control of education & politics from the Irish Catholic Church.

It is all I can do to bite my tongue when I receive questioning looks from elder relatives for not going to church, not getting married in a 'real church' etc etc.

I respect my elders but I can't square the circle that is their tacit acceptance of the evils the church has done in Ireland.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it's a matter of being in the south Dublin bubble, but I can't think of anyone I know that is religious (aside from a vague cultural identity sense). For the most part I hear the church regarded with scorn.

Things like this may help - [https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/school- baptism-bar...](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/school-baptism- barrier-is-unfair-on-parents-says-bruton-1.3137790) \- though for all that I just added my daughter to an educate together waitlist. She's two months old.

<comment><USER4> The vague cultural identity can have fairly concrete impacts though - baptisims, kids making their first communion in school thus religious instruction, Church control of schools etc.

From the 50 odd primary schools listed here as being ins South Dublin a quick read through puts a majority as religious run schools just based on the name: [https://www.schooldays.ie/primary-schools-in- ireland/primary...](https://www.schooldays.ie/primary-schools-in- ireland/primary-Dublin-south-county-dublin)

My wife is expecting our first child in a few weeks - I expect to go from the registrar office with his birth cert straight to the two nearest Educate Together schools.

<comment><USER3> I wasn't even thinking of baptism or communion, to be honest it was more of a "I guess my family would be considered protestant / Catholic" sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's similar in other countries, too:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29765623](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29765623)

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/a-history-of-residential- schoo...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/a-history-of-residential-schools-in- canada-1.702280)

<comment><USER6> And now we are basically told that these actual sufferers described in the article are "colonial oppressors" and sometimes "bigots", equally responsible for whatever is pegged on them.

Somebody have found an excellent way to distribute their responsibility on the whole population when amassing even more wealth for themself.

<comment><USER7> You seem to be pretty angry about something no one seems to be saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm afraid we are still having this all across the world, in the form of child protection services.

People who, contrary to their naming, only care about taking children from their parents and putting them in institutions or redistributing them to foster parents.

Whatever tiny grain of trust I had in them burned in many scandals they get themself in and then failed to get out properly.

</comment><comment><USER8> Perhaps it was everywhere: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/bindoon-...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/bindoon- boys-town-the-sad-truth-behind-britains-lost-children-1782544.html)

<comment><USER9> Not exactly the same, but there are kids suffering the same and worse conditions right now in orphanages throughout eastern Europe - Belarus, Romania, Russia.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure most of children who was in orphanage in Russia are adopted already and there's a line for potential foster parents.

(On the other hand, people are reluctant to adopt teenagers who are otherwise entitled to free apartment as they come of age)

Expect Belarus to be the same but not sure about Ukraine.

<comment><USER9> In the case of Russia, I was mostly thinking of it's treatment of disabled kids by the state. Up to 30% of russian disabled children are institutionalized - maybe orphanage is not the right word.

[https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/09/15/abandoned- state/violen...](https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/09/15/abandoned- state/violence-neglect-and-isolation-children-disabilities-russian)

<comment><USER6> Yes I can see how it is a problem. Not many people want to adopt a disabled child, and people will often reject heavily disabled babies after birth. It's not an easy problem to tackle.

Iceland shows promise in this respect, where they now have essentially zero Down syndrome babies thanks to screening.

> Russia should stop abuse of children with disabilities in state care

they write, but it seems impossible to me. How would you make overworked and irritated workers of institutions truly care about emotional well-being of their subjects?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These are the outcomes you get from a state church. The purpose of the Church is to be the opposition, not the right hand of government.

You do ask yourself when people in the US will turn away from nondenominational Baptism, it's about time.

</comment><comment><USER11> Related, the "Verdingkinder" in Switzerland [http://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-16620597](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16620597)</comment>