Am I My Code’s Keeper?
Am I My Code’s Keeper?
Torah && Tech Issue #9
This Dvar Torah was originally published in Torah && Tech, the weekly newsletter I publish together with my good friend Ben Greenberg. To get the weekly issue delivered straight to your inbox click here.
_4. If one leads his animals into a field or a vineyard, or lets his animal loose and it eats in another’s field, the best of his field or the best of his vineyard he shall pay.
- If a fire goes forth and finds thorns, and a stack of grain or standing grain or the field be consumed, the one who ignited the fire shall surely pay._
Exodus 22:4–5
In the first Torah portion after the momentous revelation at Mount Sinai, the Torah is surprisingly mundane — three chapters of mostly civil law. Laws of how to deal with lost property, monetary damage, financial matters, the extent of responsibility for borrowed or rented objects, monetary disputes, liability for injury caused by one’s self or property, and so on.
Many of those laws may seem like they don’t apply today to our urban lifestyle. Do we really need to worry about our cattle grazing in our neighbor’s property? (Our dogs maybe, but, as the internet likes to say, they’re good dogs, Brent).
A look in Talmud, however, will show that the two verses quoted above have generated pages upon pages of debate, and the modern applications of those debates are still being debated today in Yeshivahs and study halls worldwide.
Earlier this week the tech world was rocked by the news that a popular app used by millions to communicate contained a vulnerability that allowed it to be used to spy on its users. Then, perhaps more maliciously, one of the largest social media platforms was reported to have paid teenagers to install a VPN that handed over virtually all of their data to the Social Media giant.
As we write software and “let it loose” into the world we have to ask ourselves: To what extent are we responsible for the consequences of the software we write? What if those consequences will only manifest further down the line? If an algorithm we wrote to help locate a cellphone ends up being used to spy or track people is that on us?
There are no easy answers to those questions. They aren’t even easy questions to ask. What we do know is that we can’t afford not to ask them.
These are discussions that have been going on for thousands of years, and still going on today. These are conversations we have to have with ourselves as developers, as a team, as a company, and as an industry as a whole.
The answers won’t come easy, but hopefully, we’ll learn a lot just from asking the questions.
Shabbat Shalom,
Yechiel