Opinion | 'If You've Built a Chaos Factory, You Can't Dodge Responsibility for the Chao... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...azon-rekognition-tim-cook.html
chaos responsibility tech complicity ethics tyranny policy crisis
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“Too many seem to think that good intentions excuse away harmful outcomes,” Mr. Cook told the assembled graduates of a school from which much of the modern internet has sprung. “If you’ve built a chaos factory, you can’t dodge responsibility for the chaos. Taking responsibility means having the courage to think things through.”
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he made the case that possible abuses of the technology weren’t necessarily Amazon’s responsibility, because any tech tool can be turned into a weapon — even one as benign as email, which was used in the Sony hack a few years ago. “You could use a knife in a surreptitious way,” he said.
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Tech’s ploy to assuage its growing chorus of detractors has been to beg for forgiveness over and over for making a mess, promise to follow laws once someone else figures out a way to manage the madness, and then hire an army of lobbyists to make sure those rules are not too onerous.
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the release of this offering right in the midst of punishing scrutiny of how the company has bollixed its main platform is what one might call a gangster move. Not literally, fingers crossed.
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Pointing out that companies like Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, Palantir and others have been supplying the immigration agencies with all kinds of software, devices and services, some of which may have been used to help separate children from their families, Mr. Ryan said he was perplexed as to why tech companies did not have more of an ethical conscience.
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“I think that what the companies right now that are holding the power need to recognize is that the government could not do what it is doing now without them,” he said. The tech companies’ tools are making it possible, he suggested, to track immigrants with increasing expertise: “What we’ve seen is a scaling up and a quickening of the efficiency of this tyrannical operation.”
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“If tech wants to walk hand in hand with our government in this experiment in tyranny,” Mr. Ryan told the crowd, “then go for it.”