So, by being programmers we believe and behave as elite intellectuals and are apparently by-default exempt from the implicit side-effects of our behaviour?
Have we as implicit white-collar workers easily been suckered into offering services without social protection? Have we signed our intellectual property over to short-term rhinos for the sake of peace? How many clever programmers care about ethics? I say so many care about reflection yet few about projection.
Reflection implies staring into oneself. Projection implies throwing oneself into the unknown.
I strongly do not believe that people who can write intricate meta-programs in the convoluted crappy programming languages we have re-designed over and over for the last 60 years were and are stupid enough not to comprehend the crate load of social side-effects they are responsible for. If geeks are not capable of projecting the consequences of their own labour and existence into society then they are either in a superior state of self-denial or stupid.
Our best programmers claim that a programming language designed in the image of man is the best programming language to solve real-world problems with. So much for evolution. We can do better.
As programmers we have relentlessly and by default continued to distance ourselves from society whilst desperately trying to impress and belong to it.
Society has inevitably detected the Catch-22 enforced by co-existing with nerds like us; The more nerd you are the less you belong yet the more you are required. You need to fix the crap you create.
Nerds continue to design abstruse programming languages. We continue to re-define corresponding real-world practical challenges in the light of our programming languages. We delight in justifying our new designs upon our new-found and convenient re-interpretations of age-old problems.
Computer nerds (almost) never fully gang together for the benefit of society but instead act like a bunch of selfish television actors. Nerd compromises are dimly lit for the sake of the non-programmer public. Considering the wealth of intellectual power behind programmers, a concentrated effort targeted towards global better well-being is not beyond imagination.
Computer programming is no longer singularly applied science. It has become a victim of social awareness and thus from now on belongs partly to the study of social science.
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