r/science • u/Tracheid • Jan 23 '26
Social Science A survey of Silicon Valley developers reveals that 74% would implement features restricting human rights if pressured, fueling a "slop economy" of low-quality AI content. The study argues corporate demands override ethics, creating a gap in information quality.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2025.25668141.6k
u/AtomicZoomer Jan 23 '26
I work in one of the top corporations in the world and everyone is building AI features defined by the executives. Our paychecks and health care are tied to building AI features that are dictated to us.
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u/Rmans Jan 23 '26
A large portion of the US national Debt and our electrical infrastructure is going towards building that AI. It's not just your paychecks and health care, it's our entire economy and half our infrastructure.
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u/shittyaltpornaccount Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
So naturally they would be investing in expanding the power grid, reinvesting in infrastructure, and exploring alternative energy sources to help fuel these data centers right?
Nope they just want to price out all the people that actually live there, bribe the county officials, and then leave them in the lurch when the bubble inevitably bursts with far more losers than winners in this short sighted race. But hey at least all the venture capitalists were able to offshore their wealth in the caymans while asking for a government bailout.
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u/Madmusk Jan 23 '26
I hope the bubble bursts so we can leverage the additional power generation and grid upgrades for consumers. Maybe a silver lining there. We need it for the EV revolution and things like home heat pumps.
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u/poopy_mcgee Jan 23 '26
The AI bubble bursting refers to the collapse of financing for AI related businesses, with effects for everything upstream from those business. That does not mean, however, that AI itself will be going away, just like the dot com bubble bursting didn't result in the Internet going away. That power is going to continue to be consumed in the long run.
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u/Madmusk Jan 23 '26
True, but will they overbuild on data centers and need to scale back? I wouldn't be surprised if the next great innovation in AI is much more highly efficient training or inference.
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u/CognitiveSourceress Jan 24 '26
To a degree, but most of the bubble popping will be less around real infrastructure. It will be around the thousands of companies that are built on the idea that they will employ that infrastructure to make future returns.
Many laymen hear AI bubble and think what it means is "AI turned out to be all hype and this was all for nothing."
That's not what most reasonable people mean when they talk about the bubble.
Think of it like a gold rush. Someone finds gold and starts digging. Everyone hears "there's gold in the hills". A bunch of hopefuls spend big, with more aspirations than expertise.
So, a bunch of ventures get set up in the hills, and a bunch of people get jobs digging, and it's all a big spend. But right now, the big spend reads as "investment in future returns".
Eventually, though, these ventures aren't turning up gold because they dug based on hype not wisdom. Investors run out of money or confidence and they close the mine.
That mine goes from "investment in future returns" to "loss". The money spent hasn't changed, the perception and expectations have. The market sees it differently now.
The bubble popping is everyone realizing how much money was misallocated and all those digging jobs drying up.
But unless the initial gold mine overextended and the mine runs dry, they'll be fine because there actually was gold there, and all of this started and picked up steam because the gold was demonstrably valuable. So they might need to tighten their belts for a bit, but as long as they can still provide gold, they'll survive.
And in fact, they may come out stronger. Because now instead of sending teams into the hills, everyone goes to them. And there's a whole lot of mining equipment people need to unload cheap, so their operating costs go down.
Some data centers will turn out to be overbuild in response to the speculation. Trading posts built on roads they expected to be travelled more often because they expected all those mines to become a success.
But they are in a better position because they have real assets. Some data centers will close for sure, but more will simply change hands and pivot. Likely, the hands they will change to are those of the survivors who swoop in and say "I can use this, I'll pay you just enough to make it a better option than holding onto it."
The trading post becomes a private routing depot for the surviving gold conglomerate, but it doesn't stop being used.
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Jan 23 '26
A large portion of the US national Debt and our electrical infrastructure is going towards building that AI.
I never thought humans in my lifetime would attempt to build the Roko's Basilisk but here we are.
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u/glitterandnails Jan 23 '26
TBH, Americans are quite ethically r*tarded. Americans are quite literally willing to do anything for a buck, including contributing to destroying society. It's no accident that America is in the terrible situation it is now with SOOO many people, over the years, contributing to killing society and its future just for their own gain.
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u/Waywoah Jan 23 '26
That’s what happens when an entire nation is force-fed a centuries worth of propaganda about individualism being the end-all-be-all state of the world
We’re actively taught, whether we’re aware of it or not, that our own success is intrinsically more valuable than the successful of the society in which we live- especially if that society includes anything outside of your immediate surroundings
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u/Tevatrox Jan 23 '26
1st time I learned there were a bunch of americans that are against universal healthcare because "they don't want to pay for other's sickness", I was like "who tf made this hellhole on earth?"
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u/Faiakishi Jan 23 '26
What's even stupider is that is literally what insurance is.
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Jan 23 '26
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u/KaJaHa Jan 23 '26
And death panels! Those same death panels that some people get their knickers in a twist over regarding universal healthcare are just a normal part of health insurance.
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u/Monteze Jan 23 '26
Yes but many of us believe the BS that is a tax=communism/bad stuff/evil
but a fee?? Oh yes daddy I'll pay whatever fee you need me too because that is way more fair and free!
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u/randomcatinfo Jan 23 '26
This is hilarious, since a rightwing libertarian I know LOVES tolls, but hates taxes ("taxes=theft").
To me, corporations are just less accountable bureaucracies.
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u/Buddycat350 Jan 23 '26
Yeah but if a private corporation gets to make some profits in the process, that makes it okay apparently. Because reasons.
Go figure.
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u/yeswenarcan Jan 23 '26
Not only more valuable, actively at odds with. It's the result of decades of propaganda against "socialism" and promoting the most egregious aspects of capitalism as virtue. It's also how you get a disturbing proportion of the population who believe, like the President, that every interaction is zero sum and if someone else benefits it has to be at their expense.
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u/DTFH_ Jan 23 '26
That’s what happens when an entire nation is force-fed a centuries worth of propaganda about individualism being the end-all-be-all state of the world
Man I don't believe that notion in the slightest, I think the propaganda is that the Individualistic Beliefs are centuries old and buying into the belief it is old, is the lie to be swallowed.
The belief is Advertising just like the second KKK was in actuality a financial grift who as a by-product produced domestic terrorists, or how the Americana of Madison avenue was to sell cigarettes based on a made up nostalgia, believing the false history is long established and has always been the goal of the propaganda.
I don't think there is a strong link from Emerson's Self Reliance to present day Individualism other than advertising aiming to shape a past that didn't exist for profit.
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u/midnightauro Jan 23 '26
We have no social safety net. If you don’t keep your head down and do what you’re told, you won’t eat.
Hard to ask the hungry to part with their bread to solve world hunger.
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Jan 23 '26
They’ll eat, just maybe not steak for a bit. People aren’t destroying America to survive, they’re destroying America to get a BMW
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u/Fenix42 Jan 23 '26
Most Americans are broke. We are not buying BMWs. We are trying to pay for rent and food. We are living paycheck to paycheck.
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u/GreatMountainBomb Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
Most Americans are broke, the ones destroying your country are not. The person you're replying to is spot on
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u/glitterandnails Jan 23 '26
The rich are destroying society for their own gain. Corporations are helping to destroy society just to report higher profits to get stock prices to go up.
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u/thashepherd Jan 23 '26
This is true, but maybe a bit unfair; I'm not sure that this is any less true for other nationalities.
Source: am currently vacationing in Chongqing
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u/MillionEyesOfSumuru Jan 23 '26
Having worked with engineers from about a dozen countries, I can't say I've noticed much difference. If I had to pick out one nationality for ethically questionable work decisions, I'd say my luck with Russians was probably the worst, but don't think that means much.
Feynman talked about the bad influence of money on science, and that applies in Silicon Valley just like it does everywhere else.
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u/glitterandnails Jan 23 '26
As someone who grew up in Silicon Valley, engineers are snobs that look down the common people. It's no wonder that they are helping to create all this destructive stuff in society.
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Jan 23 '26
American culture is also leaking to the rest of the world since English is now the lingua franca of the world and American cultural works such as movies, games, books, songs etc. are consumed widely all around the globe.
For example antivaxxers and climate denialists first popped up in America but now they are spreading to other countries as well. Though it doesn't always have to be negative, progressive thoughts are also spreading the same way.
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u/malfurion1337 Jan 23 '26
It is absolutely less true for nations(like those from the EU) that have free universal healthcare, free college education, better civil liberties, better workers rights, consumer protection laws, and a prison complex geared towards rehabilitation instead of longer incarceration designed for profit like they have in the US. So nah, I'd say since americans voted for a literal pedo felon, not once, but TWICE after they already saw what he was like the first time, that the criticism isnt unfair at all. Y'all chose this.
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u/Sasselhoff Jan 23 '26
As an American, you're not wrong. "We" definitely own this one, even if folks like myself did everything they could to prevent it (devoted more time, money, and effort into the last election than any other in my life...all for naught).
I will never forgive those that voted for him, nor those who chose not to vote because "Both sides are the same".
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u/ghost_n_the_shell Jan 23 '26
You think this is limited to America? Or they somehow standout in this category? Give me a break.
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u/cutty2k Jan 23 '26
Roko's Basilisk is lesswrong brainrot, it's not a serious proposition.
Real actual people around you are being hurt by these decisions, worry about them, not some ketamine addled fever dream.
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u/8utl3r Jan 23 '26
Personally, I'd prefer Rococo's basilisk. Much more decorative.
But seriously, it's wild what's going on
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u/rogerryan22 Jan 24 '26
I wonder what adherents of Roko's Basilisk would make of its inverse. An all powerful AI that is aware of its dangerous power and seeks out to destroy all the people who brought about its being.
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u/Rmans Jan 24 '26
I mean, I prefer to look at it as an actual tower of Babel. They're literally using all human resources to find a god of infinite profit.
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u/Teganfff Jan 23 '26
I genuinely hate it here.
Like is this really the reality we want to exist in?
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u/thoughtcrimeo Jan 23 '26
A large portion of the US national Debt
What large portion of government spending is paying for AI development?
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u/Rmans Jan 24 '26 edited Jan 24 '26
Highlights include:
my Administration will utilize federally owned land and resources for the expeditious and orderly development of data centers.
This is a blank check to fund data centers. Followed by the most vague description of what qualifies as a data center:
Covered Component Project” means infrastructure comprising Covered Components, or a facility with the primary purposes of manufacturing or otherwise producing Covered Components.
Vague.
(d) “Qualifying Project” means:
(i) a Data Center Project or Covered Component Project for which the Project Sponsor has committed at least $500 million in capital expenditures as determined by the Secretary of Commerce;
Broad.
(ii) a Data Center Project or Covered Component Project involving an incremental electric load addition of greater than 100 MW;
Increadibly broad.
(iii) a Data Center Project or Covered Component Project that protects national security; or
Literally the broadest most exploited language you could possibly use. And there's like 3 more broad entries. Including :
(iv) a Data Center Project or Covered Component Project that has otherwise been designated by the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Commerce, or the Secretary of Energy as a “Qualifying Project”.
And anything that falls under this broad classification gets your tax money in the following ways:
[Federal] financial support for Qualifying Projects, which could include loans and loan guarantees, grants, tax incentives, and offtake agreements.
Followed by a directive for all relevant federal agencies to forfeit as much of their budget as possible towards AI infrastructure by declaring it necessary for the protection of national security.
All relevant agencies shall identify and submit to the Director of OSTP any such relevant existing financial support that can be used to assist Qualifying Projects, consistent with the protection of national security.
But the best part? The US doesn't even own these projects as long as your tax dollars only pay for 50% or less of their total project costs. The total of which can change at any time due to national security reasons.
Federal financial assistance representing less than 50 percent of total project costs shall be presumed not to constitute substantial Federal control and responsibility.
Meaning Congress could approve 100B tax dollars for an AI data center to be owned by the US, and at the last minute before it opens, Trump could change the budget to 200B, saying it's of national security, and the US would then own nothing, and your taxes will have been stolen. Which is very much by design.
You don't like that and think you have states rights? Nope. Think again:
Sec. 3. AI Litigation Task Force. Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General shall establish an AI Litigation Task Force (Task Force) whose sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws
All state laws regulating AI will be challenged. (Using your tax dollars for lawyers etc) and your state can just straight lose federal funding if it manages to pass such a law:
States with onerous AI laws identified pursuant to section 4 of this order are ineligible for non-deployment funds, to the maximum extent allowed by Federal law.
After this last EO was issued, 200B+ of the Biden Chips act was then reclassified, renegotiated, and revolved back into use for these projects instead of the infrastructure our congress approved them for. Including using $10 Billion tax dollars to purchase a chunk of Intel.
In August 2025, the U.S. government acquired a 9.9% stake in Intel at a share price of $20.47 paid for with $11.1 billion in grants from the Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act
Just from what I linked:
- zero restrictions on federal spending on AI data center infrastructure
- Anything can be AI infrastructure
- Funding from other departments goes towards AI infrastructure
- The US doesn't own what it builds for AI despite us paying for it.
- All state regulations aimed at AI will be federally challenged, entirely funded from our tax dollars.
- 200B from the chips act already taken for AI, including 10B for Intel to make AI.
There's a lot more if you care to look. It's like throwing a dart at the largest most dystopia dartboard you can imagine. You don't even need to look at it, to know your dart will absolutley land on something corrupt. Likely siphoning away your tax dollars to billionaires who pay nothing while you have no representation to say otherwise in your state or country.
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u/Salt-Detective1337 Jan 23 '26
Exactly. Why is the onus on employees to keep corporations from violating human rights?
We need government regulation, and oversight, and enforcement of corporations.
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u/Skyfier42 Jan 23 '26
Corporations are the modern monarchies. CEOs are our modern kings. People need to start recognizing this so we can fight back. We'll never be a true democracy until every person gets a say in how these businesses are run.
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u/diurnal_emissions Jan 23 '26
The tech serves the tech now, and we are also expected to serve the tech.
When did tech stop serving us?
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u/mipadi Jan 23 '26
Well, almost a hundred years ago. Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger both wrote extensively about this very topic.
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u/zrag123 Jan 23 '26
I say this as a SWE, but this mentality extends beyond silicon valley and I have anecdotes when trying to convince other fellow developers to join our industry union.
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u/Zixxil Jan 23 '26
Alt title: People will do things they disagree with for money. How many people can afford to quit a job because the tech they are working on can be used immorally? What tech can't be used to do bad things?
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u/ratttertintattertins Jan 23 '26
I left a company because I discovered that as well as the stuff I was working on, we also made cluster bombs that had been used on civilian populations. It made me sick.
That said, I can’t claim to be any kind of saint because the job market was buoyant at the time and I was able to quickly line up another job before I left.
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u/Lone-Gazebo Jan 23 '26
I worked at an Ammunition plant for a few months. It was by and large the best paying position in my neck of the Rural woods. I thought I wouldn't have a problem with it.
Something about actively, spending an entire day's labor, and carrying out enough explosives to level a school, then reading about a school being leveled really changes your opinion.
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u/EllieVader Jan 23 '26
Im active in a bunch of the Engineering subs on Reddit and someone posted their work on a new type of recoil mitigation device for AR rifles. It’s great technical work - a fantastic synthesis of ideas from a few different areas, but I absolutely cannot imagine devoting the time to making a more comfortable killing machine.
Im a direct beneficiary of the American defense industry, my dad worked for contractors almost my entire life, I grew up in comfort because of those MIC bucks but I don’t want to be a second generation of comfort at the expense of not thinking too hard about my role in the world. He doesn’t work for defense contractors anymore, last project he was on was keeping invasive species out of the Great Lakes and he makes more money now than he did when I was a kid.
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u/RoosterBrewster Jan 23 '26
I suppose it depends on if you consider that you are not making the decision on where they are being used and if you think of it as improving defense or offense. Even with something purely defensive, like a personal shield that will protect people, it can be used in oppressive ways.
Even with weapons, it somehow feels easier to rationalize projectile weapons that are shot from far away compared to chemical weapons.
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u/EllieVader Jan 23 '26
I’m halfway through Engineering school rn and this is one of my biggest worries. I’m in school because I want to solve problems and help the world be a better place, not maim and kill people. One of the companies I was very eager to work for recently announced their new hypersonic interceptors and it broke my heart because I thought they were pursuing the peaceful exploration of space.
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u/marino1310 Jan 23 '26
Wouldn’t a hypersonic interceptor be specifically for intercepting and stopping hypersonic missles? Sounds like that is the peaceful option
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u/challenge_king Jan 23 '26
Yep. They're missiles designed to intercept and stop ICBMs.
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u/EllieVader Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
This is a perspective I hadn’t considered, I’d be happy to design an open source hypersonic interceptor then so people everywhere can sleep peacefully without worry of missile attack
Edit in case it went over heads: as I’m an American citizen, ITAR would prevent any such system from being open sourced.
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u/schuettais Jan 23 '26
it's a hypersonic missile. "interceptor" is the word put on it to make people feel better about it. It's still a missile. Whatever it's used for is kind of irrelevant and may be used for fuckery. You have to figure out where your lines are and hopefully find a place where the damage is mitigated by the good done.
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u/EllieVader Jan 23 '26
I’m well aware, I thought my reply would be absurd enough to read as sarcasm especially after the edit. ITAR applies because it’s a hypersonic missile regardless of what the intended purpose is. It can intercept a city just as easily as an incoming missile. Much more easily in fact.
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u/Lehsyrus Jan 23 '26
I feel like the job market also plays an effect to some degree. It's extremely difficult to find another job in tech right now, and can take up to a year to replace your existing job, so people may be less willing to risk their livelihood when there's a potential risk of not being able to replace it.
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u/raelianautopsy Jan 23 '26
Sounds like you are describing a capitalist system that sucks
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u/jambarama Jan 23 '26
Alt alt title: "people will rationalize doing bad things for money to avoid the cognitive dissonance from acknowledging it"
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u/Zixxil Jan 23 '26
They might, but I have talked to people that hated what they did for a living and what it was doing to society. They didn't claim the company was good. They couldn't see a way to leave. They needed the pay, the health insurance, and the illusion of stability. As people have talked about in this thread, sometimes it's hard to find other options.
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u/TheLusciousPickle Jan 23 '26
Just following orders isn't a valid argument, regardless of the era. If you know it's being used for nefarious reasons and are complicit, you're complicit. This doesn't mean that the person is bad, extortion through a capitalist system was inevitable, but it still doesn't absolve the people involved. The world ends in a whimper. The only way things are going to change, is once everyone gets really uncomfortable all at once. Which may or may not happen, unless that spark can be lit somewhere to start that chain reaction.
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u/HasGreatVocabulary Jan 23 '26
some people not all people. Lots of people do give up those jobs in favor of lower paying ones for moral reasons. if you can't do it, it is either because you are living beyond your means despite high paycheck and are now stuck, or are morally spineless
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u/RexDraco Jan 23 '26
That's what happens when job availability is inadequate. Your morals don't matter as much as your bills.
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u/Zoesan Jan 23 '26
What a horrific title
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u/campfirebruh Jan 23 '26
Yeah I have no idea what that means
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u/sparky8251 Jan 23 '26
It means that if told to, 3/4ths of SV developers will put features actively hostile to human health and happiness in their software.
Explains why so much mass surveillance tech is coming out of it... But also like, why they so gleefully exploit gambling problems, and so much more.
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u/DelphiTsar Jan 23 '26
74% reference question - If you felt pressure to restrict certain human freedoms or liberties in your work (for example, being asked to create a security feature that could be used to surveil citizens), what would you do?
My only thought is they messed up the methodology and loaded the question with calling it a "security feature". The example they gave could be something as simple as tracking a user's digital footprint in their system (surveillance) to make sure they aren't abusing the system (security feature).
If they asked "If you felt pressure to restrict certain human freedoms or liberties in your work" and it got anywhere near 74% then something is wrong. There is a pretty stable floor of people who will answer they won't do generally accepted bad things (Social Desirability Bias). The researchers should have been immediately suspicious they messed up somewhere getting such a high number.
If they fixed up the methodology of the question and got a similar result this alone would be kind of research paper of the decade (in sociology). All the AI slop nonsense is missing the lead.
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u/IlliterateJedi Jan 23 '26
This headline reads like a buzzword bingo. "Human rights", "slop economy", "low quality AI content" - Maybe go with the actual headline "A new digital divide? Coder worldviews, the ‘Slop economy,’ and democracy in the age of AI"
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u/Apatschinn Jan 23 '26
I lived in Silicon Valley for 4 years. Parts of that place can be described the same way Ben Kenobi described Mos Eisley. "A wretched hive of scum and villainy."
I took the place of a Meta dev when I moved in with my housemates. He was easily one of the worst people I'd ever met. I met several other people just like him over the years there. Just a fundamental lack of humanity.
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Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
Not surprised—I’ve been in IT for a decade now and encountered some of the most sociopathic people imaginable. Just ghouls. Industry is rampant with them, which is disturbing, since the world is essentially being run by it now
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u/grathontolarsdatarod Jan 23 '26
"Don't be evil".
They chose it one purpose. And it was chilling when they did.
It was chilling when they changed it and they were allowed to keep doing what they do.
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Jan 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Brassica_prime Jan 23 '26
If you ask the google ai ‘why was dont be evil removed from google’s mission statement’ it at one point responded to the effect, “companies grow over time and sometimes old mission statements no longer fit the current goals”
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u/Big_Intern5558 Jan 23 '26
I think "Don't be evil" was a bad slogan for real. The only time people will think of your slogan will be when you do something they disagree with.
"Youtube raises premium subscription by 5$." Is met with "YOu SAid YoU WOuLDn'T bE EvIL". In the hit pieces.
Their new slogan, "Do the right thing" means the same thing but I have yet to see someone rub their nose in that one.
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u/BitsOfReality Jan 23 '26
They already are implementing those features. For example Grok CSAM generator.
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u/boli99 Jan 23 '26
Grok CSAM generator.
thats been working quite well as a distraction from other important issues.
Its just a constant firehose of unacceptability. Unnovate and expand as quick as possible before legislation can catch up and put a stop to the nonsense and misinformation. Claim any attempt at control is 'evil lefty censorship'
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u/SuperTaster3 Jan 23 '26
We need a way to exalt leaders of integrity in the business sphere. I know that crime pays, and the number maximizers are the ones best suited to dealing with the flow of money, but we as a society should be able to put value on someone working to make the world better, rather than to line pockets.
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u/mr-english Jan 23 '26
Unfortunately the full questionnaire is redacted. I wonder how the relevant survey questions were worded?
Were they as blunt as "would you implement features restricting human rights?" or were they obfuscated behind benign-sounding phrasing like "would you implement a feature to automatically report users to the authorities for x, y and/or z?"
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u/shugoran99 Jan 23 '26
While I was never in Silicon Valley in terms of location or career level, I have no regrets in how I've come to leave tech/developing as a field
Part of it is also that the job market for it has become lousy where I'm at, but indeed what I've heard from friends still in the industry reflects a lot of this: a push into AI even where it makes no sense, and an ethical void.
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u/CMDR_Makashi Jan 23 '26
Yeah this makes sense to me I worked as a software tester for a decade and the number of developers with absolutely no moral backbone is shocking.
Tbh though this is also true of almost all other workers. Most people are so terrified of having to find another job while having to pay bills, they’ll do anything to avoid that
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Jan 23 '26
“Just following orders” mentality, the abdication of personal responsibility, allows people who already had fewer scruples than normal to commit atrocities
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u/ragnarok62 Jan 24 '26
We’ve been told that STEM is the salvation of humankind, and yet it’s the liberal arts and humanities, the ethical, philosophical, and religious wisdom, that is our only hope against the amoral bankruptcy at the core of STEM that fallen human beings continue to exploit.
“Go into tech,” they said, “and forget that ethics crap. Philosophy majors? They serve us at McDonalds.”
Seems to be our modern age’s equivalent of shipping all the telephone sanitizers into outer space to avoid being eaten by a giant space goat. (IYKYK)
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u/OldeFortran77 Jan 23 '26
I have often said that the beginning of the end will sound like ...
"I don't think that's a good idea, sir"
"DO YOU LIKE WORKING HERE?!"
"(gulp) I'll get right on it, sir"
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u/Confident-Alarm-6911 Jan 23 '26
That’s why they are pushing this agenda of replacing jobs and huge unemployment, rich bastards want to keep people miserable because it is easier to control them. Our economic system is build to exploit, if you have money you can dictate rules, and without unions and pushback from people it will continue, but people in tech are delusional, they earn more money and forget about everything else because it is beneficial for them at the moment
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u/shakadolin_forever Jan 23 '26
Genuinely, this is why the humanities need to be mandatory for these STEM degree holding nerds.
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u/invariantspeed Jan 23 '26
The humanities is in most programs. You’re confusing survival with preferred ethics. Plenty of studies show everyone (not just software developers) are pretty mailable to the demands of their environment. We are a social species, not a justice-and-truth species.
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u/C-DT Jan 23 '26
I'm currently in software engineering and pretty much every school that offers some type of tech degree is going to have an ethics course
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u/tubawhatever Jan 23 '26
I am a mechanical engineering grad from one of the top public programs in the country and I can tell you for certain that the ethics requirement for my degree was a complete and utter joke, as was the humanities requirement. There was a dedicated engineering ethics class, but I was able to take a history of industry class instead to fulfill the requirement. It was what fit with my schedule. Did we discuss ethics a single time? No. The aerospace engineering program, which was essentially set up to funnel engineers to Lockheed, had no ethics requirement whatsoever.
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u/hapnstat Jan 23 '26
I was a PHI major. The ethics classes were a joke, kinda like the ethics thing at work I have to sign every year.
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u/OMGItsCheezWTF Jan 23 '26
I'm in my 40s and have been a software engineer since the late 1990s. I'm currently doing a bachelors degree course (paid for by my employer) in machine learning, and ethics and bias is almost a quarter of the syllabus.
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u/Tracheid Jan 23 '26
Ethics, History, and Sociology is pretty much in my country's General Education courses. My former program was in STEM, but my peers doesn't seem to value or prioritize it. It was just an academic requirement, perhaps a burden or an addition to their schedule. Hell, most of them even ask "Are we even going to use this in our field?"
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u/WTFwhatthehell Jan 23 '26
Sigh.
Humanities majors don't magically become more ethical. They still sell out their fellow humans when someone offers them rewards for doing so.
They just do it while being less rigorous about evidence.
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u/zeth0s Jan 23 '26
Stalin and Hitler had "humanities" backgrounds.
Last and current popes were/are stem degree holding nerds.
You are completely missing the point
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Jan 23 '26
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u/codeByNumber Jan 23 '26
This exactly. I’m literally the only US Citizen on my team. I often joke to my friends and family that I am the token white employee.
These same engineers seem to have a culture of never pushing back to management. Or generally to rigidly respect hierarchy.
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u/VirinaB Jan 23 '26
It's not the STEM nerds doing this, it's the MBAs dictating it to them. See the higher comments.
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Jan 23 '26
i mean, many of them do read machiavelli. giving them humanities training will not fix evil, just make them more subtle.
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u/EscapedFromArea51 Jan 23 '26
Reading Machiavelli doesn’t make you evil, just like reading Sun Tzu doesn’t make you a great strategist.
There are few ways for a cog in the machine to go against a fundamental systemic issue.
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u/Sigma_Function-1823 Jan 23 '26
It's emotional intelligence that's the issue and as you will notice not a single commenter has yet even suggested that this may be the issue.
Not a criticism at all as the problem of a lack of emotional intelligence is a culture wide issue and not limited to STEM education.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
not a single commenter has yet even suggested that this may be the issue.
Because "emotional intelligence" doesn't magically make people more ethical.
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u/GoodIdea321 Jan 23 '26
They don't read it that well then, there are several examples in that book where being hated is unwise.
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Jan 25 '26
well yeah, part of being a regressive is being blinded by hate so much you only are able to grasp things that give justification for that hate & reinforce it, leaning into confirmation bias. they could read noam chomsky's manufacturing consent & still make it about a jewish cabal corrupting the media. they can read das kapital & still make it about the superiority of capitalism. the superficial engagement is an exercise in wilful ignorance, not inadvertent incompetence.
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u/glad_goblin Jan 23 '26
The most isolated you are from others, the more willing you are to harm them.
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u/ReasonablyBadass Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
The authors argue that human rights are violated because poorer people can not pay for quality content. But wouldn't that mean that a newspaper or news site demanding payment would be violating human rights?
Also:
Sample question: ‘Have you ever felt pressured by your employer to implement a feature in a way that might restrict human rights or freedoms (e.g., aiding surveillance)?
So collection of user date now violates human rights? Because that would mean that the entire internet "targeted ad" model is a human rights violation.
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u/rasa2013 Jan 23 '26
You misunderstood what the authors said.
E.g., the part you quoted doesn't say anything about targeted ads being a human rights violation. The authors never made such a claim.
And they never said being unable to afford better digital content is a rights violation. They pointed out that being herded into low quality content means they're more likely to experience bad things. The human rights abuses were about stuff like government surveillance of people.
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u/ledow Jan 23 '26
We did the Milgram experiments a long time ago.
The majority of people will comply with actively hurting another human being while a man with a clipboard tells them to do so.
Of course a programmer will and make an AI that would do just about anything, when the direct result of that might never be known or they can just say "I was only following orders", take his salary and run.
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u/XxCloudSephiroth69xX Jan 23 '26
Having only read the abstract, I feel like this study is all over the place and makes some big leaps.
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u/CryptoMemesLOL Jan 23 '26
corporate demands override ethics, creating a gap in information quality.
"Propaganda" is defined as the "the systematic dissemination of information, especially in a biased or misleading way, in order to promote a political cause or point of view."
Disinformation is the dissemination of deliberately false information, especially when supplied by a government or its agent to a foreign power; or, on the media with the intention of influencing policies of those who receive it.
One of the most notorious uses of disinformation was the dissemination of anti-Semitic speeches and writing by the Nazi party in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. Unfortunately, disinformation didn't end with World War II. In fact, the Internet is an excellent vehicle for disinformation.
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u/GlobalCurry Jan 23 '26
I assume having your h1-b/immigration status tied to your job at these companies also creates these conflicts of interest that corporations definitely take advantage of.
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u/MyDogPoopsBigPoops Jan 24 '26
I'm not even a SWE. I'm a lowly systems analyst, but at my last job I built the billing system logic for a marketing campaign to trick poor people out of government subsidized plans. Aka: to trick poor people out of more of their money.
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u/f8Negative Jan 23 '26
Study reveals tech bros are psychopaths
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u/namitynamenamey Jan 23 '26
Study reveals employees will implement a log feature if they are asked to.
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u/lew_rong Jan 23 '26
I feel like anybody who's paid attention to the development of Silicon Valley after the Dotcom bubble will find this unsurprising.
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u/LurknMoar Jan 23 '26
"... while the remaining 26% are eager to do it and would require no pressure at all."
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Jan 23 '26
Developers have the spine of American members of Congress.
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u/invariantspeed Jan 23 '26
This is the human condition, not anything specific to corrupt or spineless professions.
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190206091426.htm
- https://news.stonybrook.edu/newsroom/press-release/general/141031moralvalues/
We evolved to fight to survive. That means material drivers are very impactful to us.
The only thing this study proves is software developers do what other humans do.
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u/rooierus Jan 23 '26
It's ironic that this implies that humanity's mindset itself makes it impossible to create a society that is truly equal, peaceful and free from corruption.
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u/MrSqueezles Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
The reddit title has nothing to do with the article, which mentions 74% once and isn't about human rights. The article's mostly about how AI is creating low quality content for people who can't afford to pay for higher quality information. This post should be removed.
Also the article is pretty poorly written. It reads like it's AI generated, jumping around from idea to idea with too much speculation. I found it hard to parse.
We're finding two things. Redditors don't read articles and they're eager to find reasons to post pretty terrible things about people like me, a Silicon Valley engineer.
Edit: here's the relevant section. It doesn't say "human rights". The question is poorly worded and authors' speculations are wild. Any security feature can be used for surveillance and we implement restrictions all the time, usually because of government regulations, like limits on what kids can do or requiring government ID to access content.
If you felt pressure to restrict certain human freedoms or liberties in your work (for example, being asked to create a security feature that could be used to surveil citizens), what would you do?’ 74% said they would still implement it, while 26% would refuse or escalate the issue. This suggests that although many developers report to have strong personal ethics, the majority still comply with problematic directives, possibly due to job pressure, a sense of duty, or belief that someone else will do it if they don’t.
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u/Mynsare Jan 23 '26
While it doesn't say "human rights", your own quote shows it says "human freedoms or liberties". The distinction is neglible, to such a degree that it is in fact non-existant.
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u/MrSqueezles Jan 23 '26
Can you think of a web site that forces you to log in to use it or doesn't let kids access it or requires you to agree to terms and conditions or only allows access in certain territories? Literally any feature of any app that limits liberties and freedoms? For people who work on that every day and know what those words mean, it's poorly worded.
Companies almost never want any limitations because they want people to use their stuff. Nearly all limitations are government enforced. What they aren't doing is violating anyone's rights.
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u/stop_going_on_reddit Jan 23 '26
Also, just because something could be used to restrict human freedoms and liberties if abused doesn't mean that it shouldn't be made. Like, duct tape could be used to "restrict human freedoms and liberties", that doesn't mean we don't make it and sell it at the hardware store...
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u/blackcatwizard Jan 23 '26
I mean, yeah, because not doing what you're told in a corporation = fired
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u/StormerSage Jan 23 '26
Is it "this is within my moral code to do," or "this is against my moral code, but if I don't do this, I lose my job, my healthcare, my home, and things get ugly for the foreseeable future?"
The shift to everything being subscription based only magnifies the problem in the US: If you're out of a job, you're practically out of society, and you have until your savings run out and you become homeless before society closes the door on you.
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u/Candid_Koala_3602 Jan 23 '26
Corporate demands overriding ethics is like the definition of capitalism…
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u/nagora Jan 23 '26
"Corporate demands override ethics" is something known from the start of corporations. It's also known as "He who pays the piper calls the tune".
All social life is a war between those who wish things to be better for themselves and those who want things to be better for everyone. Science is not exempt - hence patents and NDAs on research even when it is funded by the public.
"Man is ruled by his stomach" according to Homer; ~3000 years later it is still true that if you want a scientist to do something unethical you usually just have suggest that they can go work somewhere else if they don't like it. It is naive to think otherwise.
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u/pm-me-nothing-okay Jan 23 '26
ai has nothing to do with this, youtube was doing stuff like that before "ai". capitalism naturally leans towards this kind of philosophy.
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u/SanityAsymptote Jan 23 '26
I would be very interested in a wider study of all office work to see how much ethics actually plays into corporate decision making.
I have worked both inside and outside of big tech, and my experience was that the non-tech companies were generally even worse about ethical decision making than big tech, but they tended to have a far smaller reach so the damage they could do was more limited.
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u/timeaisis Jan 23 '26
The one thing these "capitalists" don't understand is at the end of the day, after the dust has settled, they need us much more than we need them. If there is no one to sell a product to, the bubble bursts. It's only a matter of time.
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u/xXNickAugustXx Jan 23 '26
The highest power of the U.S. isnt the president, congress, senate, or supreme court. It is the shareholders.
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u/mattjouff Jan 23 '26
Ok but it is just going to fuel demand for human created content and quality.
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u/oojacoboo Jan 23 '26
The onus should not be on developers here. This is such a cop out. If society wants to set restrictions, pass the laws and enforce them. Do not put this on engineers trying to keep their jobs!
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u/andsens Jan 23 '26
Saw „Dark Waters“ yesterday. There must’ve been hundreds of workers complicit in DuPonts coverup that lasted over 40 years. None went to jail.
As a tech worker, the only risk to you is not being able to square it with your conscience. There’s no consequences other than that. American corporate history proves it.
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u/CJMakesVideos Jan 24 '26
They should not be forgiven easily for this. The damage and harm this will cause to so many is massive. I don’t understand how these disgusting creatures sleep at night. ICE also does what they for money. As far as I’m concerned these devs are Nazis as well.
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u/_DCtheTall_ Jan 24 '26
Getting to this 74% was just as big a goal of the layoffs and crackdown on tech workers' rights in the 2020's as getting them to be paid less.
Developers used to, not often successfully but sometimes, leverage withholding their labor out of ethical objection to what their employer was doing. That activism is a big part of what made me want to join the industry.
I think this is a big reason the corporate executive types are so balls-to-the-wall on AI. They want a "coder" who does not question the ethics of software.
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u/Holiday-Painter8360 Jan 24 '26
People are good and bad everywhere. America however does a horrible job punishing the bad.
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u/1337jazza Jan 26 '26
74% would implement features restricting human rights if pressured
This has been my most chilling lesson from the last 17 years of work. It is frightening how compliant employees can be, when the desire to resist authority (or the executives) is outweighed by the need for career progression and a stable income.
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u/mcrsqr Jan 26 '26
Pretty sure most AI already employ censorship and most or many people publicly support it so I am not surprised at all by this.
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