Kita miris pada dokter yang hanya memikirkan profit. Bagaimana jika para pegiat, pebisnis, dan insinyur digital – yang memiliki kemampuan rekayasa sosial dalam skala besar – hanya berpikir soal profit? Saatnya etika dan tanggung jawab sosial para pegiat digital mulai dipikirkan.
Sebuah essai yang menarik yang mengambil analogi antara piranti lunak dengan obat kedokteran. Mereka yang berkecimpung di dunia digital, dari mulai programmer hingga pebisnis nya harus mulai memikirkan soal etika dan tanggung jawab sosial.
We inhabit an interesting time in the history of humanity, where a small number of people, numbering not more than a few hundred, but really more like a few dozen, mainly living in cities like San Francisco and New York, mainly male, and mainly between the ages of 22 and 35, are having a hugely outsized effect on the rest of our species.Through the software they design and introduce to the world, these engineers transform the daily routines of hundreds of millions of people. Previously, this kind of mass transformation of human behavior was the sole domain of war, famine, disease, and religion, but now it happens more quietly, through the software we use every day, which affects how we spend our time, and what we do, think, and feel.In this sense, software can be thought of as a new kind of medicine, but unlike medicine in capsule form that acts on a single human body, software is a different kind of medicine that acts on the behavioral patterns of entire societies.The designers of this software call themselves “software engineers”, but they are really more like social engineers.Through their inventions, they alter the behavior of millions of people, yet very few of them realize that this is what they are doing, and even fewer consider the ethical implications of that kind of power.
