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Tech Nightmares That Keep Turing Award Winners Up At Night
itwbennett writes: At the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany this week, RSA encryption algorithm co-inventor Leonard Adelman, "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf, and cryptography innovator Manuel Blum were asked "What about the tech world today keeps you up at night?" And apparently they're not getting a whole lot of sleep these days. Cerf is predicting a digital dark age arising from our dependence on software and our lack of "a regime that will allow us to preserve both the content and the software needed to render it over a very long time." Adelman worries about the evolution of computers into "their own species" — and our relation to them. Blum's worries, by contrast, lean more towards the slow pace at which computers are taking over: "'The fact that we have brains hasn't made the world any safer,' he said. 'Will it be safer with computers? I don't know, but I tend to see it as hopeful.'"
The danger is that those of us with brains aren't the ones who become politicians.
Those are the tech nightmare that keep me up at night, anyway.
Javascript keeps me up at night...
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
Previously, you wandered around foraging for food, and were under the constant threat (while awake or asleep) of being eaten by a predator, a competitor, or falling prey to some disease.
Today, for the civilized world, food is relatively abundant, advanced medical care is available, people can walk down the street without maintaining perpetual vigilance for predators, and can sleep soundly at night in their houses.
These protections don't apply as well to the poor class, but even most of them are better off than we were before our brains evolved to their current state.
That we as a species understand the building blocks of the universe, have access to energy sources like never before, but still pretend like we have a scarcity economy, forcing people to work in theater-like pseudo-jobs just to circulate tokens called "money".
Wow, good thing we implemented the leisure society with resources for all just like we thought we would in the 1960s-1970s, when they had even less technology and resources than today!
'The fact that we have brains hasn't made the world any safer,'
Historic increases in average lifespans say otherwise. People are losing their minds because the world is too safe....
love is just extroverted narcissism
As long as the computers aren't actually sentient and nuking us, the biggest things to be afraid of are how society will change with technology.
Right now, the thing that worries me the most is technological unemployment - automation technology eliminating so many jobs that we have huge economic and social problems caused by not enough people having income. But that's not a technical problem (i.e. adoption of a certain technology necessitates it happening), it's a social/cultural problem (i.e. our inability to share the fruits of automated labor for the benefit of all).
And as I'm sure many /. readers know, people problems are a lot harder to solve to technical problems.
"The fact that we have brains hasn't made the world any safer"
Now, I understand that life isn't a zero-sum game, and I don't want to belittle any of the truly horrible things that are happening in the world right now... but on the whole, the world is a safer place than it's been in probably any point in humanity's history.
Violence is down.
People are, on average, living longer, healthier lives.
Poverty is declining, if only slightly.
And so on... never been a better time than right now.
=Smidge=
Not only has our brains made the world safer, but it has enabled communication technology that allows to be informed about dangers from around the world that we have virtually no chance of being victims of so we can be afraid of them anyway.
Though Blum is an expert in cryptography, he's not particularly worried about privacy. "I find the fact that cameras are everywhere is helpful," he said, citing the example of the Boston Marathon bombers. "It's wonderful that you can find pictures and know who they are."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"Token jobs," as you have defined them, do not deliver value. Therefore, the invisible hand of capitalism will never abide them.
Labor automation will never result in someone paying people money to do something that is not beneficial to the payor. That isn't how humans operate.
Instead, the jobs will vanish, unemployment will rise, which will make crime rise, which will result in a whole lot more people in prison, which will then bring unemployment numbers back down (not because they are now employed, but because they are no longer counted). The lower unemployment numbers will be cited as evidence that labor automation does not eliminate jobs.
Meanwhile, new prisons will be built and will quickly be filled up by the unemployed, where those people will spend the rest of their lives in gender-segregated cages so they cannot breed. Obviously, this will eventually result in a natural population decline, which will bring the labor supply back into balance with the new, reduced need.
That, at least, is the best case scenario (though obviously quite ghastly, anything more benevolent than this is just beyond human organizational capacities). The only realistic alternative is another global war to kill off the teeming masses of poor people.
I would say it is a toss-up between these two possibilities. But nobody will ever pay anybody to do valueless labor (not for any length of time anyway), so you don't have to worry about that.
This is deeply religious thread, all affectations of cleverness aside.
But, can a person determine if the cows are real cows, or a computer representation of a cow? That is the real question to ask.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Cow troll is a damn Yankee. Consider yourself sunk--by a Confederate submarine. BOOM! Glug, glug, glug.
There are billions of people in the world, we can work on many different problems simultaneously, if they are problems that we can solve. I highly doubt that the people in this article could have any effect on coltan mining in DR Congo. The people who can fix these issues live in DR Congo, if we as Americans try to assist in the problem, it will just be considered another war of aggression, so we have pretty much decided to stay the hell out of that region and let them deal with it themselves.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
If what we really fear today is incomplete long-term archiving for every scrap of garbage on the internet, that shows just how safe a world we've inherited. By the standards of what previous generations used to fear, picturing the tragedy of some of our porn being literally unviewable in 300 years is not such a big deal.
Ignore me
IPv6 ought to keep Vint Cerf up at night, as he played a central role in that monumental fiasco.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
See subject: You're right & said it perfectly - yet, you're downmodded for it... go figure!
* Those you speak of invent NOTHING (but war & trouble).
APK
P.S.=> Don't worry though - everyone here pretty much KNOWS it's true & you're right as rain... apk
IPv6 is working perfectly, both as native dual stack where ISPs have made it available and also through the various tunneling transition mechanisms. The only fly in the ointment has been that a lot of the bigger ISPs have been dragging their heals a bit in rolling out dual stack, but even that hasn't stopped IPv6's exponential adoption curve. It's coming along nicely, year by year.
Whatever "fiasco" you're talking about, it exists in your head alone.
The fact that we have brains hasn't made the world any safer,
This is an interesting statement, but a ridiculous one. The world's having brains makes quick, large changes more likely. This can help or hurt "safety".
help: public health, organized food, refugee aid organizations
help: respond to extinction events like ice ages, shifting habitats, epidemics, maybe asteroids
hurt: large wars, doomsday devices, pollution, hypothetical food-constrained population boom-bust cycles
I expect he's overfocused on war because it is "bad, m'kay." Sea animals are killing each other all the time, justsayin'.
Either that or he is counting years without incident: a rock on Mars is "safe" because no brains. Life is safe. Martian bacteria are growing under it. Life is good. Therefore lack of brain is moral. I get it, but think it's a bit silly.