Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

by Martin Kleppmann

A technology is not good or bad in itself—what matters is how it is used and how it affects people. This is true for a software system like a search engine in much the same way as it is for a weapon like a gun. I think it is not sufficient for software engineers to focus exclusively on the technology and ignore its consequences: the ethical responsibility is ours to bear also. Reasoning about ethics is difficult, but it is too important to ignore.

How about this: “In our surveillance-driven organization we collect real-time surveillance streams and store them in our surveillance warehouse. Our surveillance scientists use advanced analytics and surveillance processing in order to derive new insights.”

Just as we look back today at the early decades of the industrial age and wonder how our ancestors could have ignored pollution in their rush to build an industrial world, our grandchildren will look back at us during these early decades of the information age and judge us on how we addressed the challenge of data collection and misuse. We should try to make them proud.