I disagree. Not in principle, but because I think it won't work. If an organization has teeth in this market it will be turned into a weapon to gate out or remove competition.
I worry that Ethical software will lose out to unethical software. There is too much pressure and low-hanging fruit to do any kind of gate-keeping that won't be circumvented.
If you want to take the required measures to not circumvent the gate-keeper, that is strangling the entire sector.
Since most developed countries see this sector as the basis for future growth, so doing that seems unlikely.
Beyond that, the growth would probably move to less restrictive places.
I suppose the question is how much faith you have in oversight boards to actually produce ethical outcomes.
My worry wouldn't be "they'll cut down on competition to ensure ethical behavior", it would be "they'll block competition and protect their member instead of ensuring ethics."
I think the top-level essay here is extremely cogent: oversight is almost always limited to ensuring competence. In medicine, that gets us 'ethics' when ethics means "providing good care and avoiding bad care". (It hasn't gotten us ethics when the question is anything complicated, like defining mental illness.) Competence in data science and software is largely orthogonal to ethics, so I expect an oversight board would achieve very little in that regard.
If I understand your question: nothing, professional associations become anti-competitive gatekeepers in every endeavor.
Roughly 30% of US workers have mandatory occupational licensing before they can do their jobs. Licensed services have roughly 15% higher prices than nonlicensed ones. Most of those workers are not in safety critical jobs - on average an interior designer faces more stringent licensing requirements than an EMT.
Unions and professional associations have consistently been the main lobbyists advocating professional licensing as a way to keep wages high (by keeping supply low) and guarantee a role for the organization. Even in medicine, the number of residency slots is controlled in a way that creates a stable, minor shortage of doctors.
I'm not against all licensing and oversight, obviously. I'd rather have a cap on residencies than untrained doctors, if those are the only two choices. But the history of 'every other endeavor' looks to me like a lesson in how oversight organizations will cause exactly this problem.
There is always a trade off, but each occupation learns the hard way thst it’s worth it. Hopefully software will figure that out in time to regulate itself before the government steps in with agendas and a heavy hand.
Medicine encompasses everything from practice to research, humans to non-human animals, procedures and devices to drugs and therapies, and touches nearly every human alive.
Engineering is even more diverse and penetrating, and software is merely a subset.
