I’m not a fan of comparisons to the Hippocratic oath. The greatest risk to AI ethics is not the ethics of software engineers but the ethics of the software engineering process. By the time tasks are handed to engineers, most of the ethical decisions have been made by product managers, designers, and business stakeholders who are focused on their own goals. Software engineers are accountable to their bosses before their users, no matter how high minded we like to pretend to be. To say it’s on the engineer to do no harm puts them in the tenuous position of doing the job or being replaced by someone who will. That isn’t setting us up for success.
The Hippocratic oath sounds more altruistic than the alternatives, but good legislation, including business audits and incentives, will have far more impact than a software engineer swearing they won’t be evil.
The Hippocratic oath sounds more altruistic than the alternatives, but good legislation, including business audits and incentives, will have far more impact than a software engineer swearing they won’t be evil.