Software engineering has killed more people than civil engineering, yet faces no regulation
Why the software industry needs a lot of regulation
Pete Warden argues that software engineering, unlike civil engineering, lacks personal accountability for deadly design flaws. He points to aviation disasters and autonomous weapons as evidence, and identifies barriers to regulation: easy entry, global deployment, iterative development, and a culture that values moving fast. He proposes mandatory ethics education, professional accreditation, sector-specific prototypes, a single responsible owner, anonymous incident reporting, and buyer pressure. He co-founded the Alliance for Principled Tech to drive change.
It’s obvious if you look at the bipartisan pushback against data centers that technology companies are losing the indulgence we’re accustomed to receiving from the public. Once the romantic mythology that has protected us in the past loses its power, we’ll be regulated like any other industry.
- PaulKeeble
I am much more interested in reigning in the industry itself with top level regulation to protect human rights like privacy. Once the excesses of the industry and its thirst for personal data result in crimes for the executives then we can talk about what happens if the developers decide to go along with the regulation breaking.
- glimshe
I had two whole semesters of ethics in my CS college. It's very naive to believe this makes any difference, like most suggestions in this childish article, in the way engineers act in the workplace (vs let's say an effective judiciary and appropriate liability laws).
- oldandboring
I have been saying exactly this for decades, except that I have no optimism that such regulation will ever happen.