Yes it should if the networks he builds have an actual impact on real people because of their social/systemic/institutional status. If he doesn't want to do it, he shouldn't be working on networks that have this kind of impact.

What if you're a nuclear engineer that just wanna make the hot bit go hotter, and don't want to care about the nasty habit that radiation has of killing people?

I think the point was reciting the (true!) 'biased datasets create biased models' argument at best avoids, and at worst actively undermines those bigger questions.

Someone in another thread on this had IMO a great comment[1] summarizing the sentiment:

> If you are going to say "Well, garbage-in, garbage-out!", why do you keep putting the racist garbage in?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25286446