I got this idea into my head the other day and it’s been wandering around in that open space since then. Arid and deserted surroundings seems to be a good place for ideas to hatch. We like to see code as something pure and objective. It’s 1s and 0s. They don’t have opinions or an agenda. It is indeed something which is universally good. All endulged in our own world we passionately discuss practices and principles as if it was a matter of life or death. While it is actually only the outcome of our practices which produce matters of life or death. It’s code written by people like me who kill civilians during bombing raids by unmanned flying vehicles. Every aspect of modern warfare is built upon our collective knowledge as programmers. Let’s say, that the nuclear scientists of the 1940ies were to adopt our code of ethics, how much different would the world have been? If Einstein just said: “I’m just a scientist and science is pure and good. It’s people who make it evil.”, how would that play out? That’s what we keep saying about our code, practices and knowledge. It’s “evil people” who used them for evil and that’s not on us to fix. The objective of the programs we write are to automate some kind of process which already exists or to create a new process we didn’t have previously. Whenever a program replaces an existing process, it’s at the expense of someone doing the process already. This isn’t unique for software as it’s been the case for countless advances since we evolved into humans. What is different about how programs replace existing processes is that it’s not clear how they make removing the manual process by creating new opportunities in relation to this technical advance. There’s books written about this which will be mote worth while to read than for me to recite them. Our precious code and darling programs aren’t cute little babies. They’re infact more similar to say Gordon Gecko than a baby. They’re predators looking to remove the livelihood of others without giving much back. This is the flip side of what we do. We are infact continuously putting people put of work. Granted, there are new jobs created in relation to our programs some times, but this is not the general rule. Here is where you say: “but disruption..” and I’ll just yawn.