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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.'"
Those are the tech nightmare that keep me up at night, anyway.
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.
I was expecting something more like:
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