You state:

If you are just doing it for the money, please go into investing, not 
into engineering.

I fully agree.  However, in a monetized or equivalent socio-economic 
system (e.g., whether it is the neo-liberal USA, nomenklaturist former 
USSR, or neo-fascist economy of the current PRC), engineering has no 
control over how the monetizers behave unless, following a professional 
code of conduct and ethics, and assuming that there is no compulsion 
(imprisonment, execution, etc.), the only choice is to withhold work. I 
do not know the details of the system you engineered (and presumably 
produced) that you describe. However, if the corporation (as I presume 
you took that legal ploy to avoid unlimited personal liability) that has 
the intellectual property sells that IP to a profiteer investor, then 
your product will both be lessened in quality and raised in price, and 
outsourced to the lowest cost of production (cost efficiency). If you 
personally own the IP and can afford IP infringement legal battles, then 
the copycat infringer with lower costs -- and lower quality -- perhaps 
can be stopped from obtaining market dominance. The argument that 
"computer software" cannot kill people, even monetary accounting 
software, is demonstrably false, as you point out below for real-time 
"control" systems.  Whilst I agree with making the "dancing bearware" a 
criminal offense on the part of the profiteer management that forced the 
production of such defective and dangerous products (all software has 
defects, but all defects need to have fail-safes and overrides, and 
there should be enough testing -- with edge and impossible conditions -- 
to detect "all" the dangerous defects), one must recall that most 
systems of government are the best that "money" can buy, historically 
ending in societal collapse.  To the best of my knowledge, there was no 
criminal prosecution in the USA of any senior management that made the 
Ford Pinto decisions.

On 4/27/21 3:51 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 09:04:53AM -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> The movie is, itself, profoundly biased. It didn't explore at all why
>> a public housing project might benefit from cameras on the door of a
>> densely populated building with numerous poor, old, or unhealthy
>> tenants.
> 
> On Sun, Apr 18, 2021 at 7:24 AM LaToya Anderson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Data does not remove bias. And one can and should both read the article and watch the movie.
> 
> I imagine the camera was helpful for young white men
> entering the building.  But how does that help the old
> non-white women who are locked out or their apartments
> because the software fails 30% of the time for them?
> 
> An automated camera makes sense if software is perfect,
> but the point of the film and the paper is that the
> software is not perfect.  A automated camera should
> work BETTER than adept (and unbiased) human being paying
> attention to a monitor, not just CHEAPER.
> 
> "Dancing bearware" that only pretends to do the job should
> result in prosecution and hefty penalties for the software
> designers and decision makers if their "cost saving"
> replacement of trained human security guards results in
> a crime ... letting a criminal in or locking a tenant
> out, to be robbed on the doorstep.
> 
> I too was bothered by the film's seeming "lefty bias",
> but "my side" is *human achievement* ... engaging all
> 8 billion of us.  Leaving people out is economically
> suboptimal, but most organizations are insensitive to
> the costs they impose outside their organization.  We
> create (often bad) laws to internalize those costs so the
> organizations MUST pay attention.  Sadly, laws usually
> just make organizations pay attention to loopholes.
> 
> If the automated cameras are redesigned to do their job
> perfectly, I would love that.  If diligent security
> guards are trained and employed for the task, I'm for
> that as well.
> 
> What I am not for is replacing quality human effort with
> slapdash "cost cutting", which often means "job cutting".
> In this case, putting human security guards on the dole,
> or not hiring enough competent software designers to
> properly design and properly TEST recognition software,
> that works for everyone, not just software designers
> and ethnically similar product purchasers.
> 
> I imagine a room full of $10/hour Chinese programmers
> designing this software for Chinese customers.  I bet
> their software would do a good job recognizing blacks
> in the US if there were enough blacks in China to test
> their software with.  Offshoring has its costs as well,
> and the point of the film is that the costs are imposed
> on those least able to pay them.
> 
> I also imagine devolving software purchasing decisions
> downwards to the people who are affected by them.  In
> my ideal world, some of those tenants would be involved
> in testing and selecting the software.
> 
> Or training tenants to look at security cameras as a
> part-time job; perhaps for a rent reduction.  Software
> might be used to insure that those "informal employees"
> are doing the task they are paid for, but that could
> have bias as well.
> 
> Quality is hard work.  Nobody is perfect, and some folks
> are quite imperfect - thugs in Armani suits.  Automating
> imperfection is the opposite of quality, while designing
> to compensate for imperfection is the path to continuous
> quality improvement.
> 
> But hey, I'm a chip designer.  I invented a circuit that
> is used to ultra-cheaply identify individual electronic
> devices, WITHOUT identifying the individuals using them.
> I wrote A LOT of Linux software to test and improve those
> designs; we got the failure rate down below 30 parts per
> million, and we designed fallbacks for the unhappy 30.
> The customers would have accepted worse - but I would not.
> 
> At the end of the day, our professional satisfaction rests
> on what we have accomplished, not on what we are paid to
> do it.  If you are just doing it for the money, please go
> into investing, not into engineering.
> 
> Keith
>