With the advent of emergent technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, machine learning, etc., there's been a big debate across the industry about the morality and ethics of its application. Of course, these technologies have existed in nascent form for years, but it's only recently that the technology has somewhat caught up with the concepts to where it can start being applied.
We can see employees start to "revolt" with open letters, and in some cases, quitting. Here's a few examples:
Personally, I feel that employees who are "revolting" need to put their money where they mouth is; i.e. vote by quitting if they are ethically opposed to certain work that they are doing. As we are aware, our employment contracts generally stipulate that our work done on company time and dime basically is owned by the company; we don't really have a say on how it's utilized. I have been ethically opposed to business decisions in my prior work (an example is work I did for a large, now defunct mortgage lender during the Wild West days of subprime lending), and I always voted by quitting because I felt that it was shady and would hurt the customers. It did hurt the customers, and in fact more than a few of my former colleagues/managers went to jail for it.
We can see employees start to "revolt" with open letters, and in some cases, quitting. Here's a few examples:
- (Project Maven) Google employees revolt, say company should shut down military drone project
- (Project Maven) A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project
- (Rekognition) Amazon staff to Bezos: Stop selling tech to law enforcement, Palantir
- (HoloLens) Microsoft workers call for canceling military contract for technology that could turn warfare into a ‘video game’
Personally, I feel that employees who are "revolting" need to put their money where they mouth is; i.e. vote by quitting if they are ethically opposed to certain work that they are doing. As we are aware, our employment contracts generally stipulate that our work done on company time and dime basically is owned by the company; we don't really have a say on how it's utilized. I have been ethically opposed to business decisions in my prior work (an example is work I did for a large, now defunct mortgage lender during the Wild West days of subprime lending), and I always voted by quitting because I felt that it was shady and would hurt the customers. It did hurt the customers, and in fact more than a few of my former colleagues/managers went to jail for it.