The Architect’s Mandate: A Proposed Code
A functional oath for a tech professional would be less a pledge and more a formal declaration of professional obligations:
I. The Mandate of Inquiry
I shall have the protected right to ask “Why?”; to perform a root cause analysis on the intent behind the features I am asked to build. I will not be satisfied with metrics of “engagement” as a substitute for human value.
II. The Mandate of Consequence
I shall have the right to access any and all research on the likely human impact of my work before it is deployed. I pledge to place the long-term well-being of the user above the short-term metrics of the platform.
- This right is a novel mechanism for accountability. While human rights organizations often partner with engineers to analyze data and ethical frameworks discuss organizational “transparency”, no code grants the individual practitioner an affirmative right to access internal impact research before a product’s release.
III. The Mandate of Refusal
I shall not be compelled to design, build, or deploy systems that I believe, in my professional judgment, are designed to exploit human vulnerabilities, erode agency or privacy, or amplify division. I will have the protected right to refuse such work without fear of retaliation.
- This mandate radically expands the existing “right to refuse” work. Current legal protections are almost exclusively limited to situations of “imminent danger” of “death or serious injury”. This proposes a new, professional standard of refusable psycho-social harm, and demands explicit protection from retaliation for what amounts to secular, professional “conscientious objection”.
IV. The Mandate of Precedence
I pledge to hold my duty to the public- their safety, their agency, and their mental well-being- as paramount, above my duty to my employer’s stock price or my project’s quarterly goals.
V. The Mandate of Testimony
I shall have the protected right to bear witness to systemic public harm caused by a product I helped create, even after its release. My professional duty to warn the public shall supersede any non-disclosure agreement or corporate policy, and I shall not be subject to retribution for this testimony.
- This is a potent synthesis of legal and ethical precedent. It argues that a tech professional’s “duty to warn” the public of danger, a duty that supersedes confidentiality in medicine and traditional engineering– must also supersede a non-disclosure agreement or policy. While whistleblower laws already protect reporting of illegal activity and courts can compel testimony, this mandate seeks to extend that protection to testimony regarding systemic public harm that is not yet explicitly illegal.
VI. The Mandate of Audit
I shall have the protected right to audit the data sets and models I am asked to use before deployment. I will have the right to test for, document, and mitigate algorithmic bias, even if it conflicts with a project’s timeline or stated goals.
- This mandate targets a well-documented harm: AI systems that perpetuate and amplify societal biases. An algorithm is often “only as good as the data that was used to train [it]”. While some laws require top-down corporate “bias audits”, this mandate grants the right to the practitioner, empowering them to test models and retrain or suspend biased algorithms as a matter of professional practice.
VII. The Mandate of Sustainable Design
I shall have the protected right to refuse work that I believe, in my professional judgment, intentionally implements planned obsolescence or demonstrably contributes to environmental degradation.
- The tech industry is a massive contributor to e-waste and environmental harm, often by design (a “deliberate industrial strategy”). This mandate extends the “right to refuse” beyond immediate human danger to include systemic environmental danger, empowering engineers to advocate for sustainable “green” engineering principles and refuse to participate in practices they know to be destructive.
The framework outlined here is not a plea for rebellion. If the “move fast and break things” era was marked by a defiant, adolescent, Frankenstein-esque hubris, this proposal is (conversely) a declaration of industry maturation. It is our chance to act on what Frankenstein only briefly glimpsed long after abandoning his creation, when he confessed,
“For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were…”
A codified set of principles, with the ultimate goal of legal enactment, is what separates a collection of atomized employees from a unified profession. A single person can be fired; a profession with a shared, legally-enforceable code of conduct has power.
We are not at the mercy of an unregulated “tech monster” beyond our control. We are its architects and gatekeepers. This is the moment we stop abdicating and choose to fulfill the duties of a creator.
This is the blueprint. It is time to take ownership.