this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Yup. I'm in Automotive, I work for a company that makes software for basically any car brand you can think of. I just recently left an internally developed project that aimed to create a personal assistant in the car. It was terribly ran and will go nowhere, but other departments in other companies will probably have more success, especially since the rise of chatgpt.
To add to your point though - the main idea on how to sell this assistant to car makers was the features, but the driving force behind developing the project was customer data. Collect a huge amount of info from customers, info that is shared with the car brand, but also accessible to us. To give some credit, discussions were never about using it for evil purposes - imagine a secretary knowing their boss' schedule, our software would make suggestions like "you can't make your 1 PM luch appointment with the client, would you like to reschedule it" and "I see you're headed to Chicago and will arrive in 2 hours, should I make a reservation at that restaurant you like?" or some shit like that. But we all know that it's not the engineers who decide what the company does with the data once access to that data exists. And knowing where a user eats, having access to their calendar, having access to their phone... This shit can get out of hand so easily when a budget-oriented executive type decides it's time for this project to be even more profitable by selling the data to advertisers.
Last I heard before I left, the plan was to "get consent" to process this data through a disclaimer when booting the car's infotainment system, saying that attached devices share data with our servers etc. Read the manuals, ToS and pop-ups and don't connect your devices to systems that do this. You're already the client when buying a car worth thousands of dollars. Don't also be the product.
such bullshit. how can engineers not let this happen?
Unfortunately I think engineers, as employees of a company, don't have a lot of power. You aren't typically the one making feature decisions. You can always try to talk product people out of bad ideas, but at some point if you refuse to do what you've been told to, you lose your job. Some engineers are in a financial position to take that high road, but a lot aren't. And then even if you do quit, there will always be someone else willing to do what you aren't.
I think as long as there is money in doing unethical (but legal) things, those things will continue to happen
so this is why i think that reasonable engineers (and most actual engineers are reasonable, hence being an "engineer") should get together and make good stuff. stuff that is not corrupted by perverse incentives. an engineer is capable of understanding the flaws of an economy and how that can be detrimental to the functionality of some tool or system.
unfortunately as long as they're still subject to the whims of global capitalism, they will never be free from perverse incentives
so how can we make that not be the case? this is what engineers and innovators are thinking about. we are thinking about what the next system will be and planning how to get there.
systemic change is required, that's for sure. as to the how of that? fucked if i know tbh