Ask Slashdot: Ambitious Yet Ethical Software Jobs? 559
First time accepted submitter hwaccaly writes "I'm a mid-career developer with a fair amount of experience working on data-intensive, mathematically ambitious software projects for fun — things like physics and systems simulations, written mostly in CUDA, targeted at Tesla GPUs and small clusters. Ideally, I'd like to get paid for this kind of work, but I've found little call for these skills outside of the financial and defense industries. My conscience won't allow me to accept money from either. The medical/pharmaceutical industries undoubtedly require complex software, but the unavoidable animal testing at the end of the pipeline probably lifts its body count higher even than the defense industry's. And academia pays in degrees, not dollars. So what's left? Do any ethical businesses have a pressing need for high-performance computing, or is it basically a hobbyist niche?"
Medical (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a though bu if you are working in the medical industry on something that is killing people today then might not your body count actually be negative? Yes, I can see what you are talking about with animal testing leading to death from your work, but lets assume what you are working on ends up saving lives. Lets say in testing 10000 mice have to be killed to ensure the results from your work are correct (yeah that sucks, no one wants to kill animals) but if that leads to something that helps save peoples lives for the foreseeable future I'd argue that it could easily save more than 10000 people. so treating all lives as equal you are still coming out positive
Everything's unethical! (Score:2, Insightful)
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Everything's unethical! (Score:4, Insightful)
No such thing as an "Ethical" business .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every business or venture has its positives and negatives. The defense industry of course kills people. On the other hand, if we had no military it would not be long before some enterprising country decided that they could annex ours whether we liked it or not. The medical industry of course tests on animals. On the other hand, it preserves human life and perhaps someday -- yours. The gaming industry -- wow, what a waste of time that is. People sitting in front of their computers or televisions when they could be out saving the world -- literally. Perhaps inventing some new power source, medicine, or helping some new immigrant to learn English. On the other hand, just think of all the "blood minerals" that are used to make your hardware you use to code with.
Perhaps the only "ethical" business is to go be a gardener. (And to be frank, I could do that for the rest of my life happily.) On the other hand, I'm not sure the "weeds" would agree.
standard too high. (Score:5, Insightful)
About medical... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is tons of medical and biological heavy lifting with computers that would prevent animal testing and perhaps prevent the need for double blind medical trials (meaning we wouldn't have to give placebos to critically ill people, and potentially save twice as many people.) Everything from advances in protein modeling and dramatic breakthroughs in analyzing DNA to DNA/RNA origami (designed and implemented first in computers) that will almost certain provide exciting new cures to everything from cancer to autoimmune diseases.
I agree big Pharma is a nasty business, but there are plenty of places where you can make a meaningful contribution to the human condition and at the same time exercise your frontal lobes.
Everything you have now had a price. (Score:5, Insightful)
You drink the same water. Eat the same food. Consume the same energy.
This all has a price. You think you're a more moral man then Einstein?
Do you know what the first man to discover fire said?
"Ouch"
There is a price. Ambition has it's price. I'm not saying you should be unethical. I'm saying defense work, animal testing, etc aren't unethical. If our people didn't do it then where would we be? Imagine if the US never had defense contractors or scientists and engineers that contributed to the defense industry. What would the soldier go into battle with? Either a sharped stick and loin cloth. Or more likely we'd be forced to buy weapons from an extra national third party and be beholden to their whim whenever we engaged in war.
And what of testing on animals. What medical breakthroughs were only possible because of animal testing? Ask a biologist, a doctor, or any other stripe of medical expert what our medicine would look like without animal testing.
And why do we do animal testing? Because we consider it more ethical then doing it on people. Which is the alternative. Do you want to be the white rat in cage 1173?
Look, I don't want to attack your world view or suggest you need to do things you disagree with... What I am saying is that you benefit from these things every day of your life. I don't understand how people can look down their nose at these methods while at the same time voluntarily benefiting from the consequences.
Would you torture a lab rat to save your mother's life? I mean... torture it. I'm talking live vivisections... Ideally with no anesthesia. Simply bolt it's limbs to the to a board. This is to save your mother's life. I would. I'd take alternative paths if there were better options. But if it was a straight up choice between torturing a little animal and a human being dying. I choose human life every time.
Am I an evil person for making this calculation? Are the millions of men and women that have made this calcuation for generations evil? You eat evil every day. You drink it. You live in an evil society that is part of an evil civilization then. Because my view on this matter is the default setting for our whole civilization going back thousands of years.
In all our long history I'm not sure if we've ever come across another society that believed as you did... that put these things above their own survival. Consider that that is odd because we've encountered many societies and civilizations. That we've never encountered one with your values implies one of two things. Either human beings are genetically predisposed to not value that view. Or any society that does embrace that view dies out. In the end the second would become the first... so perhaps it's all the same.
In any case, if I were you... and I'm not... I would find a field in which you are challenged and valued. Obviously don't go working for demons, but possibly tone down your standards to something a bit more practical. You are not living in a world of saints. We're simply people. We're not entirely good or bad. We simply are. Try to accept that without holding people to unreasonable standards.
Re:Medical (Score:5, Insightful)
Animal testing isn't the first step in medical research, it's the last step before human trials.
Do any of those "ethical" people want to take the place of those animals or do they think other humans should take that risk?
Re:Visual effects (Score:4, Insightful)
Anything remotely related to MAFIAA is obviously too unethical. ;)
Re:Everything's unethical! (Score:5, Insightful)
He said that "academia pays in degrees, not dollars", which hints that he'd consider the wages paid in academia insufficient.
In actual facts, university-employees are paid in dollars. They're just lower paid than financial analysts etc.
Re:Medical (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, the needs of animal testing are generally reduced by the availability of high-performance computing anyway. Animal testing is expensive and difficult to get approval for - much of the goal of simulation (which is the type of thing you use HPC for) is to reduce your need for it.
Re:What? (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Everything you have now had a price. (Score:1, Insightful)
"Because we consider it more ethical then doing it on people. Which is the alternative. Do you want to be the white rat in cage 1173?"
Another alternative is to not use neither humans or animal models and to accept a slowing of medical progress.
"Am I an evil person for making this calculation? Are the millions of men and women that have made this calcuation for generations evil? You eat evil every day. You drink it. You live in an evil society that is part of an evil civilization then. Because my view on this matter is the default setting for our whole civilization going back thousands of years."
This sounds like some fallacious appeal to popularity or tradition. Neither popularity or tradition make something right.
"In all our long history I'm not sure if we've ever come across another society that believed as you did... that put these things above their own survival. Consider that that is odd because we've encountered many societies and civilizations. That we've never encountered one with your values implies one of two things. Either human beings are genetically predisposed to not value that view. Or any society that does embrace that view dies out. In the end the second would become the first... so perhaps it's all the same."
So what? Until recently there probably wasn't another society that didn't think people of other races were inferior or worthy of the same rights that they had. You seem to have the strange view that it's not possible for some new stable ethical framework to develop. There is no reason to limit ourselves to the standards set by desperate ancestors who had to do terrible things to simply survive. We have more options now. We should explore them.
Complex (Score:4, Insightful)
It very hard not to be part of the problem. I struggle with this myself. It might be better to work for a co-operative or a non-profit, but they are often low-pay. If that's not an option, perhaps you can start a company or a co-operative yourself. Not wanting to go there, it's probably better to work for a small company than a large one, because the larger they get the more corrupt and less innovative they often are.
How about medical devices? Things that help and monitor old people and of that kind? Or some inventions to help traffic flows or some other kind of streamlining that actually make things better? You could also consider competing with existing companies that are taking a cut from something and just making it better and taking a smaller cut. That would leave more money for the consumers or governments or whoever is paying for the cut.
Small companies and startups often work on new innovative things and not all of their inventions are evil. They are often better working places in other ways as well. However, it's almost impossible to find a company that can only do good things. The economy is interconnected and there is almost no way of escaping the things that many do and it's quite likely that your company needs to work w/companies that aren't as high-minded as you might be.
There are many variables to this thing and nothing is perfect. When considering the environmental impact, human/labour/animal rights and not ripping off your customers and actually creating something of social value it gets so complicated that you cannot expect to find anything that would be completely satisfactory. Try to look for a lesser evil, a local maximum, if you will and then work to try to make it just a bit better.
And finally, it would actually help if you moved into a country that spends its taxes to build a better society rather than its military. Get a job in Scandinavia, for example. Just doing that would address many of things mentioned above, because we actually have useful laws up here, a working democracy where environmental issues are addressed and labour rights are honoured.
People should vote w/their feet and this doesn't only go for companies, it goes for countries, as well. I dunno if you have a family, but we actually have free schools and universities up here as well as free health care and so forth, but naturally you have to pay taxes to pay for them. However, your overall quality of life is much better this way and the societies are much better because of lower income disparity. How does a 37.5 hour work week sound to you like and actually getting paid for overtime? How about a 5 week vacation? The list goes on and on. I doubt making a few dollars more actually makes the equation more profitable, overall.
If you further consider that I belong to a union and I'm a member of a red/green left alliance party and this makes me no less valued at my workplace you should come to see how different things can be. It is normal to belong to a labour union up here.
Re:Everything you have now had a price. (Score:5, Insightful)
""Another alternative is to not use neither humans or animal models and to accept a slowing of medical progress.""
No, the alternative would be burning everything we've learned about medicine in the last 4000 years.
How much did we learn by disturbing the dead? Dissecting human remains was where our basic knowledge of human anatomy came from. This was considered by most to be a violation of the corpse.
You have some choices.
1. You can disavow all modern medicine and if you get sick simply suffer and hope to get better on your own.
2. You can be a hypocrite and criticize it while using it. This is what most do that attack the modern world. Evil when they don't need it and suddenly acceptable when they do.
3. You can moderate your position to take into consideration what is reasonable in the real world.
Those are your choices. I'm assuming you're going with option two. I find that unfortunate but there is no law against being a hypocrite.
""This sounds like some fallacious appeal to popularity or tradition. Neither popularity or tradition make something right.""
Not really. It's an appeal to reason. Everything you have had a price. Your forefathers paid it. If you find that price to be unacceptable then return what they took.
You could say that you had no control over that and you'd instead like to simply not do it in the future. Fine. Does that mean you'll refuse all NEW medical care developed through animal testing?
Point blank... Would you DIE to honor this pact? Because this is life and death. We spend the lives of little furry rats to buy life for humans. It is the calculation.
And your progress without animal testing won't be slowed. It will stop. You can't do the experiment without a test subject. Some doctors have experimented on themselves. We could do that.
Will you be my guinea pig? If you say no and won't accept research derived from animal testing then you will get no new treatment. You'll get homeopathy, a warm hand to hold while you die, and a comfy pillow.
I love my family and myself too much to accept that. I will pay the price. And if that makes me a bad person. So be it.
""So what?""
I'd rather my whole society not win the darwin awards.
If you want to go off to the woods and live like an animal that is your business. I won't trouble you. Look at the Amish. We leave them alone.
But if I have any say in it, my society will survive. If you want to die. Die. I believe in the living.
Re:Medical (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what I love about the PITA (Yes, I know it's PETA, get the joke buddy) trustafarian types. You know the ones, that tell everyone they're screwing the planet whilst living off of daddy's trust fund. Nature is violent. Nature is gruesome. The coal face of society is no different. It's only within our bubble of existence that we can maintain the suspension of disbelief that we, and all things surrounding us are immortal "universes of experiences".
Given the choice of 10,000 mice dying for the sake of medical technology to save even 1 life is more than worth it to most of human society. Disagree with me? What if that life is your life, or the life of your child.
Please, for the sake of rational agents everywhere, leave your hippie rubbish at the door.
Re:Medical (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up. I was just coming to point this out too. I did neural simulation software at the beginning of my career. The explicit goal of the project was to reduce the need for carving up mouse brains. There are lots of projects like that out there. Go find one.
"My conscience won't allow me to accept money ... (Score:4, Insightful)
"My conscience won't allow me to accept money from either."
Um - you realize you are using a computer with components from a sweatshop and unpaid foreign labor - right?
Re:Everything's unethical! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you have your cause and effect the wrong way around.
These days we generally see rich people as being unethical, so logically any work that pays well must therefore be unethical.
It's probably not true.
Re:Medical (Score:4, Insightful)
Shampoo != medication.
Also, red eyes would be a positive result. The chance of permanent eye damage is why these tests exist.
PETA and it's kin are free to volunteer as replacement for these animals.
Re:Ex-Gaming (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, with his type of reasoning game development is unethical because it causes violent behavior. This is just shallow generalisation, not every project funded by the military is for killing people, not every financial institution is unethical and not every medical development requires animal testing (if you are writing software you will most likely work on the gadgets not the new medications).
Re:Everything you have now had a price. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your stance is the stance of people who insist that viewing illegal porn should be severely punishable, because you're "supporting" the makers of the same, whether your paid them and/or had any influence on them, or not. We're usually not ultimately responsible for actions of others. You are somehow incorrectly assuming that just because our ancestors did bad shit, there's a binary choice between using the ill-begotten fruits of their labor or living in the woods on berries. Oh, and the former makes you a hypocrite (or else!), and that by using those fruits-of-labor we're actively supporting them. Watch kiddie porn, use the fruits of years of pharamcological research, make teenagers and puppies suffer. Yeah, sounds logical to me. </sarcasm>
You're also presupposing that animal testing had a big role in the medical state of the art today. I'd think its role isn't critical at all, and that in future not too far away we will be able to do without any animal testing. Animals are quite poor models even when it comes to eating the same food we do -- there's plenty of stuff we eat that's toxic to common house pets. Animals are more useful at gaining understanding of how things work -- basic science is where real value of animals was, and perhaps still is. Things like dog joint models come to mind.
I hate to rain on your parade... (Score:3, Insightful)
... but we still arn't 100% sure of how neurons work so while simulating them in a computer might be useful for AI I fail to see how it can be at all useful for medical tests.
Re:I hate to rain on your parade... (Score:5, Insightful)
... but we still arn't 100% sure of how neurons work so while simulating them in a computer might be useful for AI I fail to see how it can be at all useful for medical tests.
Partial understanding can still be tasked for useful work. As an example I give you the entire field of Physics.
Re:standard too high. (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. Interestingly, a lot of processing work in medicine is working toward eliminating animal testing, by better simulating physics and correlating similar chemicals with known results, ultimately reducing the amount of animal testing that's necessary to produce a safe drug. Animals (including the human kind) are still involved, though, and will be for a very long time.
As for finance, I don't actually see any ethical problems here. Some bankers did things that sounded good on paper and matched all known criteria for something where gain outweighed risk, but those formulas didn't anticipate the combined effect of everybody doing the same thing at once. Was it a mistake? Yes. Did some bankers realize they were doing something wrong, and do nothing? Indeed they did. Does that make the entire industry a wretched hive of scum and villainy? Not really, despite Slashdot's vocal opinion of those "evil bastard bankers".
As the saying goes, you've got to break a few eggs to make an omelette. Every industry has its distasteful activities, and every industry is trying to eliminate them, albeit in a large-scale, disorganized, and very slow way. Why not help them move forward to a world of more ethical practices, rather than just hiding from the problem and assuming that anyone will care about your silent and ineffectual protest? As another saying goes, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Re: Ex-Military (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ex-Gaming (Score:3, Insightful)
If you feel the military is inheritly evil, go to a country that doesn't have one.
The military is comprised of a couple million citizens. You should remind yourself that those people come home, drink milk and eat vegetables too. I doubt that dairy farmers or vegetable farmers are concerned with supporting the military. Who are you to discriminate against a few million people, just because you have an issue with the majority of your population permitting or demanding that a few hundred people put them in harm's way.
Whether you fully agree with the military's current actions or not, you benefit from the military. Odds are excellent that you are undereducated as to how you benefit, and thus are acting from a point of limited visibility. Certainly the military doesn't have to do any particular mission overseas; however, if it does no missions overseas, eventually it will be doing such missions within the State.
Re:Ex-Gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly the military doesn't have to do any particular mission overseas; however, if it does no missions overseas, eventually it will be doing such missions within the State.
Ugh. You know, I was mostly with you up until that. Really? You are rolling out the old "if we don't fight them overseas we'll be fighting them at home" chestnut? What if, I dunno, we didn't do things to provoke them in the first place? Have you really bought into the BS rationalization that it's because "they hate our freedoms"?
I come from a military family. Father, both brothers. I chose a different path, but I'm very sympathetic to and have much respect for those who choose to serve. I don't, however, accept bullshit rationalizations from the war-mongers who stand to profit (financially or politically) from never-ending conflict. You really think OBL and Al-Qaeda were that much of a threat before we made them so? Believe what you want, the rise of OBL was at least what those in the intelligence community call "blow-back", if not something more orchestrated by those who saw the decline of the USSR as a threat to the defense industry money train.
Don't be so naive. Invading Afghanistan as a response to 9/11 mostly made sense; they were harboring the bad guys who did it, and the mission was pretty clear -- turn over the rocks (with high kinetics) to squash the bugs. Iraq was straight-up bullshit. I understand the need for those on the ground to make their sacrifices mean something, but wanting to believe something doesn't make it true. Don't dishonor their memories by accepting the crap being fed to us by the mil-ind machine.
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." -- (former FIVE-star) General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 17 Jan 1961
Re:Medical (Score:5, Insightful)
This is wrong, I'm afraid.
First off, given the boundless evil and greed of Big Pharma, one wonders why they'd continue to spend money on animal trials if they achieve nothing more than the production of plausible deniability for the inevitable failures in clinial development. Given that they already blame their failures on the complexities of biology and the difficult regulatory environment, the benefit produced by pointing at animal test results seems pretty slim. How does your scenario work? "Well, shareholders, it's true that we've spent $50 billion this year and only put one new drug on the market, while we've had to withdraw three old drugs for unforeseen side effects, but, in our defense, we injected it into bunnies first and that seemed to work okay." Really, is that how you imagine it?
Second, do you by chance know how many potential compounds fail in animal testing before they even make it into people? If you start with 1000 compounds, and 900 are disqualified by preclinical testing (which includes animal testing) before the remaining hundred enter human trials, that's still a pretty substantial benefit. Indeed, that's about the proportion of compounds which are dropped prior to Phase 1, although the statistics I've seen don't break out animal testing specifically. The alternative to testing in animals, barring significant advances in computational predictive methods, would be to test each of those thousand compounds in people with minimal prior knowledge of safety. So for someone so concerned about animal welfare you're shockingly cavalier about the well-being of other human beings.
I wonder, do you resolve this apparent paradox by actually putting your own health and safety on the line by volunteering for Phase 1 studies? Do you keep your morals unsullied by refusing to take any medication which was tested in animals? Or are you a hypocrite in addition to being utterly ignorant?
Re:Ex-Gaming (Score:3, Insightful)
You realize there are two assumptions there rather than one, right?
1. Causing violent behavior is unethical (which I think is the one you were going for)
2. Game development causes violent behavior -- I'm not sure you thought about this one. Perhaps you meant the games themselves cause violent behavior, which is something that has been argued to death and most recent studies have shown that it is not the case. However, it sounds more like the act of developing games is what causes violent behavior. Is this akin to going postal, except doing it at EA instead of at the post office?
Re: Ex-Military (Score:5, Insightful)
You're still supporting an organization dedicated to killing people.
Depending on which country you work for, you may view it as supporting an organization dedicated to prevention of mass murder.
The US military is controversial to many people, but it was primarily the US military that prevented the spread of Soviet Communism. How many people did the Soviet Union kill - now extrapolate that to what they could have done had they controlled the rest of the world.
Chinese communists did a lot of killing too. Perhaps the US played a role in limiting their damage too. It is tough to say because by the time the Communists came to power the US was dominant enough to contain them and we don't know how aggressive they would have been toward the rest of the world (although as China (still authoritarian but no longer communist) is growing again it is threatening one neighbor with complete conquest and making aggressive territorial claims against other neighbors).