Chelsea Manning, newly freed from military prison, speaks in San Francisco - Ars Technica

SAN FRANCISCO—Speaking at the Noisebridge hackerspace Tuesday evening, Chelsea Manning implored a crowd of makers, nerds, and developers to be ethical coders.

“As a coder, I know that you can build a system and it works, but you’re thinking about the immediate result, you’re not thinking about that this particular code could be misused, or it could be used in a different manner,” she said, as part of a conversation with Noisebridge co-founder Mitch Altman.

Altman began the conversation by asking about artificial intelligence and underscoring some of the risks in that field.

“We’re now using huge datasets with all kinds of personal data, that we don’t even know what information we’re putting out there and what it’s getting collected for,” Manning said. “Our AI systems are getting better and better and better, and we don’t know what the social consequences of that are. The code that we write, the bias that you see in some of the systems that you see, we don’t know if we’re causing feedback loops with those kinds of bias.”

Manning also said that during her time in the military, she wondered if the US military was doing more harm than good in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, where she served.

“We’re making assumptions about this particular threat group, but we’re boxing them into a threat group to begin with—so they’re treated as a threat group,” she said. “It was always unclear to me whether we were helping or if we were perpetuating at violence in a particular part of the country.”

Dressed in all black and a metallic necklace with a # sign, Manning said she had just acquired a coffee table after being released from prison and was “catching up.” She also admitted that she’d been eating a lot of pizza and Tex-Mex as comfort foods.

“The tools that you make for marketing can also be used to kill people,” Manning continued. “We have an obligation to think of the tools that we’re making and how we’re using them and not just churn out code for whatever reason. You want to think about how your end-user could misuse your code.”

Altman, who is perhaps most well-known for creating the TV-B-Gone universal television off switch that debuted in 2004, led the freewheeling discussion that often had more open-ended statements than clear-cut questions.

She told Altman that she didn’t even know that her coming out as a trans woman would resonate with America as much as it did when she first reported to prison in 2013.