Yonatan Zunger in the Boston Globe:

Computer science is a field of engineering. Its purpose is to build systems to be used by others. But even though it has had its share of events which could have prompted a deeper reckoning — from the Therac-25 accidents, in which misprogrammed radiation therapy machines killed three people, up to IBM’s role in the Holocaust — and even though the things it builds are becoming as central to our lives as roads and bridges, computer science has not yet come to terms with the responsibility that comes with building things which so profoundly affect people’s lives.

Software engineers continue to treat safety and ethics as specialities, rather than the foundations of all design; young engineers believe they just need to learn to code, change the world, disrupt something. Business leaders focus on getting a product out fast, confident that they will not be held to account if that product fails catastrophically. Simultaneously imagining their products as changing the world and not being important enough to require safety precautions, they behave like kids in a shop full of loaded AK-47’s.

Source: The Boston Globe