Lessons in Ethical Development I Learned From Star Wars
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:13
Thanks so much for coming to my talk. I know there are like a ton of great talks that you could have gone to all at the same time, so I really appreciate you coming.
00:22
It's called Lessons in Ethical Development that I learned from Star Wars, and I'm gonna do it right now. I want to introduce myself. My name is Jamison, you can call me Jamie. I'm here from Buffalo, New York, which is the home of bad sports. I kind of thought that joke would go over well in Pittsburgh.
00:45
I'm here representing AgriList, that's the company I work for. We're a startup from Brooklyn, and we do farm management and data analysis for indoor farms, which is really interesting. I'm also representing Greater Than Code, that's the podcast that I'm on,
01:01
and we do a podcast about tech, but more importantly, like the people behind the tech that we use. So I have stickers, and we're actually doing a panel, a live episode panel for Greater Than Code on Thursday, I think at 2.40, if you're interested in coming to that.
01:21
And also you can find me on Twitter, at Jamie Bash, feel free to tweet me. The only thing I ask is that if you are gonna post about me, please keep in mind that I use they, them pronouns when you're referring to me. And now that we're all friends, the last important thing to know about me is that I love Star Wars. These are my Star Wars-liking credentials,
01:42
not that you need them. That is me in my Imo Kylo Ren costume. So I spend a lot of time thinking about Star Wars. But another thing I spend a lot of time thinking about is tech. And I think about morality in tech a lot, which has kind of been a hot ticket item lately,
02:01
which you're probably aware of if you've ever been on Twitter.com before. In fact, this is a question from this year's Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Do you believe that you have an obligation to consider the ethical implications of the code that you write? And I think this is a really interesting question, because when I first saw this,
02:21
my instinct was like, isn't there like an objectively right answer to this? Like is this obvious? It felt obvious to me. But it made me think of this tweet from Pablo Hidalgo, who's one of the Star Wars writers. Every time you think something is obvious, it's helpful to remember this is the Twitter that needs reminders that the Empire
02:40
were the bad guys in Star Wars. So I guess I walked right into that one. And maybe it's not so obvious, because I also see tweets like this all the time. People talking about the implications of their work kind of very lackadaisily almost, like oh, I'm just an engineer. And there's this idea that that absolves you from responsibility,
03:02
and I think that that's really dangerous. So that's kind of what I want to talk about today. I want to do a spoiler warning, because I'm not a jerk. The first part of my talk, I'm gonna talk about Rogue One. That's been out for like a year and a half, so I hope we're not having problems with that. Also, they get the Death Star plans at the end,
03:21
so spoilers if you're from 1977. The second part of my talk, I'm gonna talk about spoilers. I'm gonna have spoilers for seasons two and three of Star Wars Rebels. I don't know if anyone cares about that, except for me, but there are gonna be spoilers. And then the last five minutes, I'm gonna talk a little bit about The Last Jedi. The last time I did this talk
03:40
was like two weeks after The Last Jedi came out, and a bunch of people just left at the end, and I was like, I can respect that. So maybe not as much of a problem now. But I don't want to be a jerk. But I'm really excited to talk about Rogue One, because Rogue One is a really important movie to me. And as a Star Wars fan, I was really excited about it.
04:01
I had seen the trailers, and I was like, this is gonna be awesome. Like, look at this group of rebels. They're like marginalized people, and they're fighting against the man. And I'm gonna go on the first night, and it's gonna be amazing. I'm gonna relate to them, and it's gonna be awesome. And that's not what happened at all. The character that I related to the most in Rogue One is this character, who even if you haven't seen it,
04:21
you can tell that he's like the bad guy because he's wearing a white cape. And so I came home from this movie, and I was like, oh my God, what am I doing with my career? And I kind of want to talk about how I came to this realization. But I think it's important to kind of start
04:40
with the idea that Star Wars is this classic story of good versus evil. And at first glance, there might not be like a lot of room for gray area in there. Like, if you've never seen, if you've never even heard of Star Wars, and you look at this picture, it's like pretty, like, okay, well, these are the good guys, and these are the bad guys, obviously. And that makes me feel like, okay, well, I'm not a bad guy, so I'm never gonna do any bad stuff, no worries.
05:04
Like, call it a day. And somewhere along the line, I started to realize that it wasn't really so simple as that. This is a series of tweets by Kate Crawford, who's really smart and interesting. And this came out just after,
05:20
about a year and a half ago, a little longer than that, just after the presidential election. And she started talking about being asked to build something unethical or dangerous. She said, we need to talk about ethics more. Will you build the Muslim registry, or work on locating undocumented workers, or deploy facial recognition to identify protesters?
05:44
The technical community, and the valley in particular, has a responsibility to say what they stand for, and what they won't stand for. So talk about your bright lines. And this really got me thinking about morals, and modern morals, and how morals fit into my life and my career.
06:01
This is one of the first times I started to kind of realize that not everything is in black and white. Like, good people can do bad things, maybe for misguided reasons, maybe because they don't realize what they're doing. And the more I started thinking about the gray areas in this, I started to realize that even in Star Wars, there are gray areas.
06:21
Because in this obvious photo, where you can tell who the bad guys are, you know, this guy was Anakin Skywalker, and he was a great Jedi leader, and a war hero. And in fact, almost all of the villains in Star Wars were originally heroes, who accidentally became villains over time, due to the temptation of the dark side,
06:42
or because they were tricked by the dark side, because it's easy to trick people. You know, Count Dooku was a great Jedi too, Kylo Ren, we know who his parents are, so there were expectations for him to be a great force for good, and that's just not how it worked out. And it's also not just like, okay, well you're a Jedi,
07:01
so you're good forever, and you don't have to worry. Even all the good guys who stay good in Star Wars face temptation, and they have to make conscious decisions to remain heroes. You know, Luke Skywalker, he finds out Darth Vader's his father, spoilers. And he says, rule the galaxy with me.
07:22
Like, that's a pretty tempting offer. In particular, Rey, in The Last Jedi, or not in The Last Jedi, in The Force Awakens, finds out that she has force powers, and then is almost immediately offered to, Kylo Ren offers to teach her how to use them. Like, that's a crazy tempting offer. If I found out I had force powers, like, I would definitely want someone
07:41
to teach me immediately. It really just goes on and on. I'm like really, I'm really Star Wars trash, it's like, we're going deep into the cartoons and everything too, it's bad. But like, Obi-Wan faced temptation on Mandalore, Ezra Binger from Rebels, there's like a whole season arc about how he's learning about the Sith holocron,
08:01
and harnessing the power of the dark side. And even Master Yoda faces temptation. And if Master Yoda has to deal with it, then we all have to deal with it. Catalyst is like the novel that come, the prequel novel to Rogue One. I'm serious, like, I've read all the books, it's really bad.
08:21
But Catalyst is about these characters who you would recognize if you saw the movie. So this is Orson Krennic, the director of advanced weapons research. And this is Galen Erso, who's the lead engineer on the Death Star project. And Catalyst kind of goes into their backstory and how this happened. How did he end up working on this project? They knew each other from college.
08:41
Erso was a known pacifist, he didn't want to work for the government, like, in any capacity. But Krennic knew he was gonna need his expertise, because he was an expert on crystallography, which is like kyber crystals. And so he was grooming him for many years to be like, someday you're gonna have to work on this project. So he knew that it was his dream to work in renewable energy, and he had this whole,
09:01
all these promises about being able to work on that. And all these horror stories about how horrible the Clone Wars were, and how he could help end them. And so Project Celestial Power was what Galen Erso started working on, and he thought that it was for renewable energy, and he didn't know that they were using it for weapons tech for like, many years. And this is a quote from that novel
09:22
that kind of was like, the spark that changed how I started to think about this. This was Galen's mentor, who was already working for the government, trying to convince him to come work with her. And she said, the war has altered everything, not only for those of us directly involved in the conflict, but also for many of us here on Coruscant.
09:40
Count Dooku shook us awake to a harsh reality. Most of us have traded theory for practicality. And even so, unlimited funding has been wonderful for research. In due time, we can return to our dream, and we'll be able to accomplish much more than we ever could before. So I was reading this, and I'm like, this sounds great. Like, who wouldn't want to take this job? Like, I was almost starting to get frustrated that he was like, so resistant to going
10:01
and working with her. But then I was like, oh no, like, this is the death. I knew this was the Death Star project, because I already knew how the story ended, and I still would have gotten tricked into working on it. And that was the moment I realized that if I lived in the Star Wars universe, I would have been one of the engineers that worked on the Death Star project. And it made me think like, oh my god,
10:21
like, I've never thought about this. I haven't assigned a sense of morality to my work at all, really. And if you think of your work as amoral, like, not necessarily immoral, but just unrelated to the whole concept of morality, that can be very dangerous, because you don't really realize necessarily
10:41
when you're treading into this kind of dangerous water, because it's not on your mind. So that's kind of where I get into implementing self-accountability. And the first thing I started thinking about there was that the moment that you're faced with an ethical dilemma is not a good time to start thinking about where your line is. That makes it way too easy to be like,
11:01
yeah, sure, this sounds like a great opportunity, why wouldn't I wanna do this? Which is what would have happened with me in the Death Star. You gotta think about these things before they happen to you in order to be prepared to answer that question. And if you don't feel prepared, don't feel obligated to make big decisions immediately. It's always good and okay to take time
11:23
to think about big choices, especially in your career. And I would say if someone is pressuring you to not take that time to think about it and make a decision right away, maybe I wouldn't necessarily trust that person. And writing things down. When you're thinking about your moral code,
11:41
take notes on what you're thinking about. If I'm faced with a decision suddenly, it's probably not at a moment when I'm deep in thought about ethics. So I find it really helpful to be able to look back on my thoughts and my notes from a time when I was deep in thought about ethics. But at the base of it,
12:01
holding yourself accountable basically just means not doing bad stuff, not even as a joke. This is a graphic I made a couple years ago and I posted it online because I thought it was really funny. I still think it's really funny. But I ended up taking it down because I was like oh, if somebody like, even if only one person posts their information
12:22
and then gets their identity stolen, that's kind of like on me. Although I did put it in my slides so nobody's perfect. Also, that's not my real information in the example because I'm not an idiot. So don't even bother trying to steal my identity.
12:41
This is a tweet from my friend Brenna who some of you might know. I love this, I think it's really interesting. She said, the question should always be, should we build the thing, not can we build it? I believe we can build mostly anything. But knowing how something fits in our society and how it will impact all of us requires more nuance. I really like this because I think it's really true.
13:03
I think as developers we can get very caught up in this idea of can we do it? This is a really interesting problem. This is a really cool puzzle and I wanna solve it. And I totally understand that desire because I get caught up in that too. That's a lot of what's fun about coding. I like solving puzzles and that's why I'm a developer.
13:24
But the time to realize that the thing you made is horrible is not after you've already made it. And we've been talking a lot about Star Wars but it's not just in fiction that this happens. This slide is called Woe is Me because that's a quote that Einstein said
13:41
after he found out about what happened when he heard what happened in Hiroshima. Einstein didn't actually even work on the atomic bomb personally but his research was used for it and he was supportive of that, of using his research for that reason at the time. But he regretted it later in life. He said, had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,
14:02
I never would have lifted a finger. And this idea that many inventors feel regret or guilt about their inventions, it happens a lot. This is a picture of Mikhail Kalashnikov. He invented the AK-47 and felt responsibility about people who died at the hands of his invention.
14:21
He said later in life that he would have preferred if he could go back, he would work on inventing something that could help farmers instead. Cameron Logman invented pepper spray. He did invent it as a weapon originally but then after he saw how it was used, he was regretful about that. He said, I've never seen such an inappropriate
14:40
and improper use of chemical agents. And these have all been pretty heavy, violent examples but not everything is life or death too. Robert Probst invented the cubicle and he thought he was doing a really good thing because he's like, we won't have to have like a maze of offices, it'll be more flexible, we can have more collaboration.
15:02
But then when companies started using it as like a cost saving device in this whole culture of like stuffing in as many cubicles as possible, he was also regretful of his invention and he wrote, the cubicalizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity. Which I think is a really good quote.
15:21
But the thread of all of these is that you can't control how other people will use your work. Once you put it out there in the universe, it's out there and you're kind of seeing like a death of the author situation with these inventions. And the reason that this is really important as people who write code is that
15:40
repurpose code is even easier. You can repurpose it much easier. And code is dumb, like code doesn't know what it's being used for. Only the people who are using it have the context to know what it's being used for. We're smarter than our code, essentially. I know some days it doesn't feel like it but we really are.
16:01
So once you decide what's important to you, you have to consider what other technologies are similar enough that your code could be repurposed in that way. Here's an example. One of the examples that Kate Crawford used in her tweet was facial recognition software to identify protesters. So maybe you've thought about this and you're like,
16:21
no, I'm not gonna do that, I'm against it, I think it's wrong and I don't wanna be involved in it. And I can respect that decision. But if you're really, really serious about that, maybe you have to consider that doing facial recognition software for AR video games is maybe something you also wanna put off the table.
16:42
This is a screenshot from a Hunger Games themed AR game that used facial recognition to identify people who were playing. I do wanna note that this is kind of based on how important it is to you personally. I've had people come up to me after this talk and tell me that they didn't think the video game thing was a good example
17:02
because they didn't think it was reasonable to put video games off the table for this reason. Personally, I disagree. But if you've considered the implications and you've decided that it's not important enough to you to turn down an opportunity, I'm not here to change your mind about that specifically. What I am here to do is urge you
17:21
to think about it first. And when you make a decision, make sure you're making an informed decision on what you're getting into. This is exactly what happened in Catalyst and Rogue One. I don't think that Galen Erso would have signed on to the project if they knew what they were gonna repurpose his research for.
17:46
I really like this slide. It's kind of meta of me to put a picture of someone else's slide on my slide. But I love the quote, any sufficiently advanced neglect is indistinguishable from malice because I think that's really true. And that brings up this idea
18:01
of malevolence versus carelessness. If you create a city out of straw, you don't need a whole army of malicious people to come and burn it down. One malicious person can walk in and just burn the whole thing down because of how it was built. An infosec works the same way, which we know.
18:23
If you create a system that's compromised, that's kind of like building a city out of straw. You only need one person to come in and exploit it, and then it's too late. It's already been exploited. But I think organizations can be like this too. If you have 99 people at your company
18:41
who just aren't thinking about the ethics, if they're thinking of their work as secular from morality, essentially, as I mentioned earlier, then one person, a person like Orson Krennic, could come in and then convince everyone to build something that's unethical. And they might go along with it because there's no accountability in place there.
19:06
We're talking a lot about people who lack a moral code. And hopefully it's not, we've established that that person isn't you. You want to do good, and you want to think about how to do good. But what if you realize that that person is your boss?
19:22
Which is kind of the phrase, you have to know who the general is, I think about. Where are these orders coming from? That can be kind of a scary realization to realize that you're working for an organization like that. So, I turn to Star Wars for answers again. There's no more morally corrupt employer than the Empire.
19:40
And the Empire employs millions, billions of people. So if you find yourself in a situation like that, you have options, you have to decide what you're gonna do. Like you could decide you don't care, and sell yourself out, or you could quit. We know how Galen Erso dealt with the guilt he felt over being part of the Death Star project.
20:01
Savitar. But it doesn't have to be so obviously sabotage. So I want to talk about another person who worked for the Empire. This is kind of dark. Agent Callus from Star Wars Rebels. He was a pretty high-ranking Imperial officer,
20:20
and he was not like Galen Erso. He was like an Imperial poster boy. He rose up through the ranks. He really seemed like he believed in what he was selling. But he has this really interesting redemption arc in the show. So he has, they basically do this trope where Zab, one of the rebels, they get stranded together on like an ice moon,
20:41
and they have to work together to survive, and they realize that they begin to respect each other, blah, blah, blah, so. I actually kind of hate that trope normally because I feel like it puts a lot of pressure on marginalized people to like find common ground with the people who are oppressing them. That's kind of a rant for a different day. But they did it really well in the show
21:01
because of the way that the rebels reacted to it. Like Zab was just like, I don't have time for this. I'm not gonna fight with you about this. He was just confident, and it wasn't worth it to him to get into this argument, which is good advice when I'm getting into arguments on Twitter. But essentially, he was so confident
21:21
that he planted these seeds of doubt into Callus about the Empire. He accused him of not asking questions he didn't want to know the answer to. He also had a sense of trust in his friends, and he gets this tearful reunion at the end of the episode where his friends come and rescue him, and nobody comes and rescues Callus, and he has to get back by himself,
21:41
and then nobody cares that he was gone or notices at all. And so something here got through to him. Because he defected, he became Agent Fulcrum is like the code name for someone who's feeding imperial secrets, like an inside spy to the rebels. And so that's what he ended up doing. And I like this because it's a very different way
22:01
of fighting back against the same organization. And it gets into this idea of, well, where can you do the most good? What kind of options are you weighing? You could quit your job if you think that you're not comfortable with it.
22:21
The argument I always see against quitting is like, well, it doesn't matter because they're just gonna replace you. Someone's gonna do it and get paid for it, so it might as well be me. Personally, I disagree with that, even if it's just so I can sleep better at night knowing that I'm not contributing to evil in the world.
22:41
But there are other reasons, too. First of all, if you're specialized enough, you might very well be irreplaceable. That's kind of what happened with Galen Urso. He left, he quit the project, and it stalled for years without him. That's how you get into the beginning of Rogue One, where they're coming back and getting him, like, we need you to do this.
23:02
So he was irreplaceable. But even if not, your efforts might be better used elsewhere. Wedge Antilles is a character from the original trilogy. He actually worked for the Empire as a pilot before, and he quit, he defected. And his absence didn't really hurt the Empire because they had lots of pilots,
23:21
they just got another pilot. But then he became a pilot for the Rebellion and was actively fighting against them, and that did hurt them, because he was doing work to undermine them purposefully. Also, Rebellion from the inside doesn't have to be Death Star level sabotage.
23:41
I'm not here to try and convince you to leave RailsConf and go back to your job and literally blow up whatever you've been working on. Although if you are working on a literal planet destroyer that I don't know about, we would probably all appreciate it. But you might be able to convince your employer or your organization to change some of their practices.
24:02
Again, there's gray area here. Maybe if you worked for the literal Empire, you wouldn't be able to convince them to change their ways. But not everything is as black and white as the Empire. What if you're in one of those situations that I was getting at earlier about neglect versus malice? If there's just no accountability in place at your organization,
24:20
maybe you can persuade them to do better. And whistleblowing is really important, too. That's essentially what Kalis was doing as Fulcrum. He wasn't actively messing up the Empire's plans, but he was giving the good guys information about it so they could use that information to do good.
24:43
Fighting the good fight can be overwhelming, I think, and that's where you get this, well, if you can't beat them, should you join them, attitude. Plus, some people really do get very stuck up on that, like, well, if someone's gonna do it, it might as well be me. So, like, I kinda get it.
25:00
When people are scared, it might feel easier and safer to succumb to pressure to do things that they don't feel comfortable with. There's definitely something attractive about, like, kind of getting in with the people that might oppress you so that you're safe. This is especially true for marginalized people, actually. There's a huge societal pressure to be like,
25:21
well, you're one of the good ones, and then throwing other marginalized people under the bus, which is very frustrating. I do wanna note that real life, again, is messier than I'm making it out to be, and I realize that. Sometimes marginalized people have to be in situations like this for their own safety. I totally understand that. I'm like, I'm definitely not here to guilt trip
25:42
minorities into, like, putting their job or putting themselves in danger if they don't have that luxury. But this is just something to consider, especially if you do have that luxury. An unethical organization, like the Empire, only cares about you for as long as you're useful to it.
26:01
Not only is it unethical of you to put yourself in a position where you're oppressing others to save yourself, but it also doesn't make your oppressor suddenly, like, care about you as a person. The gulf of what it's like to be part of the rebellion versus being part of the Empire is pretty well explored in Star Wars media. You get this a lot, particularly in Rebels,
26:21
because Rebels is essentially about a family, about people who really genuinely care about each other. And time after time, I can't help but marvel over how awful it seems like it is to be part of the Empire. It doesn't appear that anyone in the Empire really has meaningful relationships with each other.
26:40
Everyone's just rooting for everyone else around them to fail so that they can, like, seize more power. So it's hyper-competitive all the time. Like, even if you rise up through the ranks and you're high-ranking, they don't care about you. In fact, the higher ranking you are, the more people are rooting for you to fail so they can, like, come up through this power vacuum. And I think Krennic is a really prime example of this.
27:03
I wasn't joking at the beginning when I said I really, like, I related to Krennic in a lot of ways. He was very ambitious, he loved networking and he was good at it, he knew a lot of people, he knew how to make connections between those people. Those are all things that I kind of pride myself on. So I see a lot of myself in this character,
27:22
which is a little scary because he's a bad person and I don't think I'm a bad person, I don't wanna be a bad person. But I do think it's really important to be able to admit when you can relate to, like, the villains, because it shows you what aspects of yourself you need to be careful about.
27:43
Orson Krennic spent his whole life working hard to gain favor within the Empire. He even succeeded at building the Death Star for them. And then they just took what he'd built and they let him be destroyed. They didn't care about him at all. He spent his entire life being the villain
28:02
and what did he have to show for it at the end? Like, absolutely nothing. I'm gonna talk about The Last Jedi now. We've been talking a lot about kind of gray morals and I think gray morals get even grayer in The Last Jedi.
28:21
What is the dark, what is the light? I'm starting to question if it even makes sense to separate them in that way. And I think that's what Luke was trying to get at in The Last Jedi when he was teaching Rey about the Force. Benicio del Toro's new character, DJ, is getting at the exact same thing. Like, good guys, bad guys, the world
28:41
is messier than that. It's easy to look at things that way, but is it actually helpful? I think he kind of has a point. My big moral lesson from The Last Jedi, though, actually came from Poe Dameron. I really like, this came out, this cover came out like a week before The Last Jedi and it said, can Poe get along with his new boss?
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And then I saw the movie and I was like, nope. But Poe's like a legitimately good guy. Like, I really trust him to legitimately have the best interests of the Rebellion at heart. But he messed up really bad in this movie because he didn't trust her and he didn't have this information and he undermined her plan and like,
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it got messed up because of what he did. And so the fact here is, even if you truly believe that you're doing the right thing, you can still screw it up. And that's especially true if you don't have all the information. And it's exactly what happened with Poe and Holdo. And honestly, it's kind of what happened with Galen or so, too.
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So I got three lessons from The Last Jedi. Lesson from Poe, get as much information as you can before rushing into a decision, definitely. But I think there's a lesson from Holdo there, too. If you're the one who's in a position of power, consider transparency for the people under you. Poe did make mistakes, but if she had been more open
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about their plan, she may have been able to prevent those mistakes also. And maybe, even though you're trying your best, despite your best efforts, you might still screw it up. And my third lesson was a surprise from Yoda. The greatest teacher failure is. If you mess it up, you just have to live with it.
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You have to make peace with it, and you have to move on and try to do better. So my conclusion? Unfortunately, I don't have all the answers. There's not a single line here that I'm telling you that no one should ever cross.
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We all have to decide where our personal line is. Decide what's important to us. But I do think that it's important to think about. I can only come up here and urge you to be thoughtful, to make a conscious decision, and then to commit to sticking to your own principles. And my hope is that if we're all a little bit more thoughtful,
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then we won't end up building another Death Star. Thank you.