false equivalence. insurance companies are in the business of denying coverage that could improve treatment, quality of life, and sometimes even someone’s life just to increase the bottom line. an dissatisfied saas cx isn’t the same.
Well, tech workers aren't directly to blame but they're surely enabling bigger men to do their dirty deeds.
Time to reflect how your work is affecting the world, folks. But even if you take action and quit now it's likely they'll find other guns to hire. If you want to make a difference you have to do a lot more than that.
> even if you take action and quit now it's likely they'll find other guns to hire
As Joseph Weizenbaum said, that's like saying there are a lot of rapes every day, so it's fine to rape.
Let those other "guns" who get hired (tempted) try and fail to make peace with what they do. If you take their place before they can, you're them, look no further.
And that person could be found to be making accurate assessments. What of it?
We are ALL complicit in the systems behind all this when we are the ones building and maintaining them.
Myself included.
The first step to ethical responsibility is honestly acknowledging what I've been taught to do and have done without unlearning those things. Second step is to consent to unlearning that and learning a different way that addresses all the issues. Third step is actually doing the unlearning/learning.
People can't just say or do any old random thing and get as much support as this gets. It does have to strike an actual nerve.
And even if a major tech CEOs like Zuckerberg or Bezos got shot, while there would be plenty people joking about that, too, it wouldn't be anywhere remotely like this, I'm 100% sure of it. There's something about denying care for profit to people screaming in agony that pushes a whole other set of buttons.
It's true that AI will be a tool used to harm people in a broad set of use cases, but the tools are too far removed from their respective applications in people's minds. People directly deal with health insurance companies, not the software vendors that sell the tools with sanitized descriptions.
It feels dishonest to imply that software engineers and tech workers, broadly, are comparable to major USA healthcare CEOs in their perceived devilhood status on average. Major social media and tech giant CEOs, sure, but even then I think they might still be a little lower on the list.
And if you're not doing that, then your point doesn't seem to make sense in the context of the thread.
There is a wide variety of jobs between "try to maximize denials and ensure maximal suffering and customer death as often as possible" American medical insurance company CEO, and useless trash job worker.
Many of those jobs even include rich CEOs of billion dollar insurance companies in industries that manage to actually fulfill a (comparatively) reasonable amount of customer claims.
