Back when we wrote this, we didn't tell anyone that we were thinking about how much longer we could stand to stay at Google, in a role that had us thinking about trolley problems for a living.
Not literal trolley problems; self-driving cars should simply do all they can to avoid obstacles. That part *does* have a boring engineering answer. But ethical dilemmas made unexpectedly practical.
It really sucked, but we felt obligated to keep doing it as long as we were making a difference. We ultimately lasted another fourteen months.
Of course, we're not letting ourselves off the hook, we're still working to hold the tech industry accountable. Hopefully it at least won't be so draining when it's not for an employer that only pretends to care about the work.
We didn't coin this phrase, but there need to be more public benefit technologists.
Oh yeah, there's one more insight we should share while we're thinking of it, now that we're at liberty to. It's not our original observation, but we can attest that we've seen it many times in practice.
It's this: Most of the time, in real life, difficult ethical decisions aren't presented as such. They aren't even presented as decisions. They're presented as one more routine part of your job, hard to distinguish from a million other things, and you're probably on a deadline.
It takes a lot of practice to recognize the important choices mixed in with all the everyday choices. Everyone will fail at that sometimes.
Lots of corporations are doing horrible, terrible things these days. If you don't want to be complicit in that, you need to do your moral thinking *in advance*, before the choice is concretely presented to you.
You need to think through the ethical hazards of the industry you work in, and what you're willing to be part of and what you're not. You need to think through what you'll do if you're asked to break those principles.
You need to know in advance, because when the decision is actually presented to you, you'll only have a few moments of attention to realize it's an important one, before you go ahead with implementing it anyway. That's just how people work, how everyone works, including us.
We apologize for being so cheerful.
