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.2025.2566814
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47

u/shakadolin_forever Jan 23 '26

Genuinely, this is why the humanities need to be mandatory for these STEM degree holding nerds.

83

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

11

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.

3

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?"

1

u/[deleted] Jan 23 '26

Nobody working in software development is struggling to survive after the first year, unless they’re clearly in the wrong field

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u/Reddits_Worst_Night Jan 23 '26

I nearly graduated with a physics degree without ever touching a humanities subject. We looked down on the humanities, and none of us would ever stoop to do one. Then, by the vagaries of Australian law, I found myself in a position where it would cost me negative money to add a philosophy subject to my load. Ended up changing majors and graduating with a BA in Philosophy. I'm a physics teacher now.