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In an October 2019 interview with Jasper Kuria, Brad Smith; Microsoft President and co-author of a New York Times bestseller explained why the world urgently needs a Digital Geneva Convention and a Hippocratic Oath for software engineers.
Today, what Smith had to say on the ethics of technological progress at last year’s Capital & Growth + Hacker News meetup is more relevant and urgent than ever.
The Need for a New Field of Ethics for AI
Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne came out in September 2019 from Penguin Random House with a foreword by Bill Gates.
In their book, Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne wrote that if something is new and not yet illegal (because the law has not caught up with technology), but confers a decisive competitive advantage, people tend to do it.
For example, Facebook decided early on to use data however they wanted to attain a dominant position in the market. Paying a $500 fine per transgression wasn’t an issue as long as it helped Facebook achieve this goal.
But Smith is a strong believer that as the first generation of humans to endow computers with the ability to make decisions, we must decide how we want machines to make these decisions consulting an ethical code.
“Almost every person in this country has seen a movie that has the following basic plot structure: Humanity invents the machine that can think. The machine thinks. The machine decides to enslave or destroy humanity. Humanity spends the rest of the movie trying to turn off the machine.”
A Hippocratic Oath for Software Developers
About two years ago, Microsoft publicly asked a question for the first time: “Should there be a Hippocratic Oath for software developers creating AI systems the way there is for doctors?”
You can’t graduate from the Air Force Academy without taking an ethics course. In the military, there is a code of justice and there are people whose sole job is to make sure this code is followed, even though this doesn’t mean that the military makes no mistakes.
There are no common ethics codes to determine how lethal autonomous weapons and systems that are developed for the military should be used once they end up in the hands of civilians.
“In the top 10 Computer Science departments in the nation, there is only one that requires taking an ethics course to graduate. Ethics is a field that will have to get infused into Computer Science education. There should be a stand-alone course called Ethics for AI that every computer science major must take.”
Brad Smith and Harry Shum (an Executive Vice President at Microsoft) developed the idea for a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers and devised six ethical principles in Microsoft.
Shortly after, Oren Etzioni, a professor at the University of Washington got his students to draft an oath, which you can read here.
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“You need to know what principles you hold fundamental.”
Shortly before this interview, Apple had removed the Taiwan flag from their Emoji set, at the behest of the Chinese government (China is Apple’s second most important market after the US, accounting for almost $10 billion in revenue).
We asked Smith, what would you do if the Chinese government asked you to remove the Taiwanese character set from Windows or be barred from doing business there, and forego billions of dollars in revenue?