FWIW Kumail has undergraduate degrees in computer science and philosophy. We went to the same college. The comp-sci department and college in general has a strong sense of ethical responsibility. In fact the computer science department makes it a point to have students make an ethical pledge as part of the major, optional of course. Please don't get the idea that because Kumail has chosen a career in acting that he has no business commenting on other industries. Even though I agree we should spend time in others' shoes before judging, I don't think his statements here are unwarranted. Your comment feels a little uninformed and defensive.
Yes, but so what? It's very easy for people who don't actually make things - like actors and academics - people who never face tradeoffs in their life, to get up on their high horses about people who do. If Kumail wants to comment on the ethics of the computing industry he should man up and write an essay in which he lays out his case, and shows why his preferred tradeoffs are better than those chosen by industry. Like anyone else would have to do, if they wanted influence.
Instead we get this clickbaity junk based on a series of tweets, which nobody would have seen or cared about if he wasn't a famous actor.
I don't think it's Kumail's fault how this got published. I got the impression this was a report on comments he made not any intention of an exhaustive essay on the state of computing. I mean I am professionally in the industry so let me say: I agree that computing across the board lacks an ethical framework and when I talk about this I usually am met with similar responses: apathy or ignorance.
I think you get that response because the computing industry has been constantly attacked with very flimsy, weak and agenda-driven accusations of unethical behaviour, for a very long time. So these sorts of accusations have lost their power, there were too many boys crying wolf.
A large part of this was driven by the decline of the newspaper industry. At some point Murdoch decided that Google was evil because of Google News, and the future of news was the iPad. This from a guy who never even uses email. So he gave some speeches and the orders went out and the Murdoch press immediately started attacking Google with very dubious stories, alleging unethical behaviour. I remember this inflection point quite well. For instance the WSJ paid someone to go digging and they found that the behaviour of Safari had changed with respect to third party cookies, in ways that weren't following the specs, and now some old code Google used was setting cookies too widely or something. This regression had of course not been noticed by anyone because everything still worked. So they blew it up into a major drama and claimed it was all an evil conspiracy, instead of a bug in Safari. Meanwhile Apple got glowing praise and a free pass.
It wasn't just Murdoch of course. The whole industry started attacking internet companies and it was all about money. See the "Google Tax" in Germany, Spain etc. So the supposedly unethical behaviour they were trumping up was very often not unethical at all, or only unethical by some totally meaningless redefinition of the word (e.g. all advertising being considered unethical).
So when Kumail tweets - and the purpose of tweeting is to get noticed and spread a message, so I give him no slack for that - and this gets picked up and inflated by the media, my impression of Kumail goes from neutral to bad. Twitter is not a reasonable place to start a debate about the ethics of technology and if he was an engineer and not an actor, he'd know that. But he's just an actor. So why give a shit?
