The solution to social problems are not going to come from nerds sitting in ivory towers, who so far have been happy to take credit for unintended positive consequences and look the other way or get defensive when negative consequences show up.

The is the wrong class of people to be guilt-tripping. As dumb as trying to guilt trip someone on Wall Street. Not that guilt tripping works at all any class of people. It just produces short term fixes under pressure with costs down the line.

Techies need to be guided by social scientists, psycologists, anthropologists, politicians local to different cultures. These are the people on front lines dealing with the consequences. That is the only route to a better place.

As necessary as what you suggest may be, it won’t come without costs. It’s likely to slow technological progress down to a crawl as every step is painstakingly debated as well as render innovation more vulnerable to political and economic interests — anybody who decides they have an axe to grind about any particular technology or surrounding field can just construct a wall of false ethical questions to debate and keep it perpetually bogged down.

I’m not arguing against having more thought put into what we do, but taking it too far could easily put us into a collective rut that is nearly impossible to get out of.

The problem is you have vast swathes of hard science people who inherently distrust or think soft sciences are worthless.

If these people are so important, why aren't they making the millions and the decisions? The money and the power are in the technologists and management. We need a route to your proposed route. Some way to convince large organizations of software developers that ethics is, somehow, more important than money.

> If these people are so important, why aren't they making the millions and the decisions? The money and the power are in the technologists and management.

You literally answered yourself. The key is that "important" != "earns money or has power".