With great power

It's no secret that we're getting better at being humanity. Average life expectancy is increasing, global poverty is decreasing, people are more educated, and our science and technology are making us more powerful and more capable as a civilisation year after year. It's funny to think that as recently as a hundred and fifty years ago, the germ theory of disease was still considered a fringe crackpot theory, and anaesthesia was a party trick rather than a surgical tool.

But today a surgeon working without asepsis or anaesthesia would be considered a dangerous maniac, and quickly be imprisoned. Similarly, our advancing views on the harm of corporal punishment for children has made it illegal in many countries where it once was common practice. In these cases and others, the driver of our morality is our capability. Before we knew about bacteria, how could we fault a doctor for having dirty hands? Before we knew about the dangerous consequences of physical punishment of children, what basis would there be for making it illegal?

I believe that, in a similar vein, there are many commonplace things today that are products of ignorance or a lack of capability to do better. The difficult thing is knowing which ones, but I'd like to hazard a couple of guesses. The first big one is psychology. Our understanding of brains and minds is so primitive today that it's hard to stop finding things that will seem barbaric and negligent in another hundred and fifty years, from our attitudes towards and treatments of mental illness to our casual ignorance of the influences and exploitation of cognitive biases. How can we have a morality of memetics when most people don't even know what it is?

The second, perhaps closer to home, is the construction of software. There was a time when physical construction was more like alchemy than science. You would put up a structure, sometimes it would stay up, sometimes it would fall down. Over time certain patterns became apparent and super amazing 10X master builders appeared who could more-or-less intuitively navigate those patterns, though it was still not entirely clear why their buildings didn't fall down. Today, we have architects who are expected to follow certain principles. If they don't, the building falls down and they are responsible, because they should have known better.

It's not clear at exactly what point we will be able to say that we should have known better with software development. Firms that produce software are already considered liable if their software hurts someone, but software developers under employment are not yet liable if they write bad code. And I'm not sure they can be yet. Who among us is so sure of the right way to write software that we would be willing to encode those ideas in law?

I long for the day when a software developer's signature means as much as a doctor's or an architect's; after all, our bad decisions can already cause similar amounts of harm. But to get there we need to be better, and we're not better enough yet.