The headlines this past week have had Google’s relationship with Israel under scrutiny as they fired employees who were against what Israel has been doing and protested accordingly. I’ve looked at some of the news stories, some sympathizing with the former employees, some implicitly supporting Israel and the order that people expect within companies.

I won’t comment on that because that’s political and this isn’t about politics, or who is right or wrong.

Of Swords And Blacksmiths.

Throughout my career as a software engineer, I’ve had to deal with ethical issues and I’ve navigated them as best I could, as challenging as some of them were and some of them were personally quite challenging.

Ever since we figured out how to bonk each other over the heads with stones (stone technology), it seems we’ve found increasing occasion to do so. It could be that the first use of such weapons was for hunting or defense of the tribe from predators – likely both – but eventually we learned to turn them on ourselves.

I’m sure at some point there was a blacksmith who refused to make swords because of where the points and edges were aimed. Other blacksmiths just made them. There always seems to be someone else to kill, or to defend against. We could get into the Great Gun Debate, but we fall into the same problem with that. There’s always some human creeping around who wants to kill someone else for glorified reasons, and because of that we sleep with things under our pillows that could very well be used to kill us just as easily. It’s not a debate. It’s a criticism of humanity and an unfortunately honest one at that.

“We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”

William T. Vollmann, No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies

Sometimes my ethics require me to move on, which I did without protest a few times over the decades: There’s always someone else who needs a job more than they care about an ethical issue if even they see the ethical issue. In the end we try, hopefully, to do more good than bad, but both of those are subjective.

Too often we use a technology as a scapegoat, an externalized criticism of ourselves that allows us to keep doing what we do. Technology can be used for good or bad; how we use that technology says something about ourselves and when we criticize the use of technology, we implicitly criticize ourselves but we don’t take the criticism because we have neatly placed the blame on a vague, externalized concept – a deflection at a species level, often because we are buying into the idea that the enemy is less than human. Yet we all are human despite ideologies, cultures, languages, and color coding that we don’t all neatly fit in.

We Are All Blacksmiths.

These days, with generative AI allowing us to paint the fence of the future once we give the corporations in control of them a few baubles, everything we do on the Internet is potentially a weapon to be used against someone else. While the firing of the Google employees who protested is news, those that still work there aren’t, and this is not to say that they aren’t faced with their own ethical dilemmas. We who work in technology hope that our work is used for good.

I worked at one place that started off with robo-calling software that was used to annoy people during elections that turned itself into an emergency communications service. Things can change, businesses can change, and controlling even a part of the infrastructure of a nation’s military can have unexpected consequences for everyone involved. What happens if Google suddenly doesn’t like something and turns something off?

The future is decidedly fickle. Our personal ethics should impact our collective ethics, but it often doesn’t. It can.

We build tools. Sadly, they aren’t used the way we would like sometimes, and we should try to influence things if we can – but ultimately, we are subject to a fickle future and good intentions that can be misdirected.