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Ask Slashdot: Has Technology Created A Monster? (codinghorror.com)
Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood posted a worried blog post on New Year's Eve.
Remember in 2011 when Marc Andreeseen said that "Software is eating the world?" That used to sound all hip and cool and inspirational, like "Wow! We software developers really are making a difference in the world!" and now for the life of me I can't read it as anything other than an ominous warning that we just weren't smart enough to translate properly at the time... What do you do when you wake up one day and software has kind of eaten the world, and it is no longer clear if software is in fact an unambiguously good thing, like we thought, like everyone told us... like we wanted it to be?
Slashdot reader theodp adds: "The year 2018 is the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," provocatively notes Dr. Ainissa Ramirez, "in which a scientist neglects to ask about the consequences of his creation. I suspect (and hope) that there will be much debate on the impact of technology on our lives in the numerous lectures and events scheduled this year. It is a long-overdue discussion because scientists sometimes get so excited about their innovations that they forget to ask, 'Am I building a monster?' This anniversary offers a pause to see if society likes where it is headed."
That quote is from a "predictions for 2018" article on the Mach technology site (hosted by NBC News) in which Dr. Moshe Y. Vardi, a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University, also sees a looming debate. He remembers how Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan referred to tech's CEO's as "our country's real overlords" and described them as "moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength."
Keep reading for some even more dire predictions...
Yale ethicist and author Wendell Wallach predicts that in 2018 "A serious tragedy will direct the attention of international leaders, under public pressure, to finally take on the difficult but incredibly necessary task of putting in place effective oversight and governance of emerging technologies... Industry leaders, fearful of more stringent restrictions on their activities, will lead the way for thoughtful oversight of digital technologies." He admits his prediction may be wrong, but argues that "reaping the benefits of innovation and managing risks must happen together."
And finally, long-time Slashdot reader gurps_npc notes that "the entire point of the book is that Dr. Frankenstein IS the monster, the flesh golem he created is just a victim of Dr. Frankenstein's arrogance and pride. The doctor created this life, then being scared of it, abandons it. Without food, money, or a basic education, the flesh golem turns to a life of crime and seeks revenge for the evil actions that Doctor Frankenstein committed. He doesn't know any better because no one educated him.
"The real lesson is not 'there are things man is not meant to know'. Instead it is 'Be responsible and take actions to ensure your creations are not used by uneducated shmucks.'"
Slashdot reader theodp adds: "The year 2018 is the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," provocatively notes Dr. Ainissa Ramirez, "in which a scientist neglects to ask about the consequences of his creation. I suspect (and hope) that there will be much debate on the impact of technology on our lives in the numerous lectures and events scheduled this year. It is a long-overdue discussion because scientists sometimes get so excited about their innovations that they forget to ask, 'Am I building a monster?' This anniversary offers a pause to see if society likes where it is headed."
That quote is from a "predictions for 2018" article on the Mach technology site (hosted by NBC News) in which Dr. Moshe Y. Vardi, a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University, also sees a looming debate. He remembers how Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan referred to tech's CEO's as "our country's real overlords" and described them as "moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength."
Keep reading for some even more dire predictions...
Yale ethicist and author Wendell Wallach predicts that in 2018 "A serious tragedy will direct the attention of international leaders, under public pressure, to finally take on the difficult but incredibly necessary task of putting in place effective oversight and governance of emerging technologies... Industry leaders, fearful of more stringent restrictions on their activities, will lead the way for thoughtful oversight of digital technologies." He admits his prediction may be wrong, but argues that "reaping the benefits of innovation and managing risks must happen together."
And finally, long-time Slashdot reader gurps_npc notes that "the entire point of the book is that Dr. Frankenstein IS the monster, the flesh golem he created is just a victim of Dr. Frankenstein's arrogance and pride. The doctor created this life, then being scared of it, abandons it. Without food, money, or a basic education, the flesh golem turns to a life of crime and seeks revenge for the evil actions that Doctor Frankenstein committed. He doesn't know any better because no one educated him.
"The real lesson is not 'there are things man is not meant to know'. Instead it is 'Be responsible and take actions to ensure your creations are not used by uneducated shmucks.'"
It's been downhill ever since the written word. By the eye of Ra I swear that we never should have started using hieroglyphs it only led on to demotic and worse, English. MWGA.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Is database/surveillance tech ALONG with an authoritarian (yes, the US government is authoritarian compared to many other democracies) government in bed with the purveyors of the database/surveillance tech. Add to this a large population of lemmings who think that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear", and it's a recipe for long-term disaster.
As a technology-employed person myself as I get older I realize the growing importance of asking the question "just because we *can* do something, should we?" The cop out of "we scientists/engineers/programmers just create it, others decide how it gets used" died in Hiroshima or by tetraethyl lead poisoning.
This isn't bombs and lasers, you say? Fine. Take an easy example. "Self-driving vehicles will save lives! Carbon!" The transportation companies will be *first* in line to replace long-haul and regional drivers with bots. Those drivers are expensive (training, insurance, wages) and have a lot of downtime. A half-million dollar rig sitting for 8 hours while the driver *sleeps* eats a lot of money.
3.5 million Americans are employed as professional truck drivers and will be out of work when self-driving freight trucks hit the roads. Hire them to build the trucks? Fix them? Retraining them is expensive -- and historically this never happens. They may not even be able to be retrained for those jobs. When industries collapse, things get really bad really fast and politicians are poorly motivated to help.
What should a good technologist do? Keep working on vision systems and feedback controls?
Get off my lawn.
If I've said it once.... I've said it a hundred times.
Our technology is evolving faster than our species.
Suicides of teen girls in the USA are up due to cell phones and social media.
Cell phones are killing our necks.
In addition to carrying a personal tracking device, governments are using and abusing any and all technology to spy on citizens
The Sun could wipe out our power grid with a direct hit from a geomagnetic storm, and utilities aren't doing anything to mitigate the risks.
5 Countries are destroying the ocean with plastics and covering the earth with asbestos.
And let's not forget about the Doomsday clock and Nuclear Weapons. We still have a cold war posture that could end badly.
We have governments with cheap gene editing tools CRISPR/CAS9 working to make designer pets that glow in the dark and super biological weapons
Video Game Addiction is rampant
The Internet is a Pandora's box of garbage and porn, bad behavior are shaping your minds through YouTube and other video streaming sites.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. There will be a tipping point and this will lead to global unrest.
We can truly say it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. If we could all just grow up and use our technology for good, but we can't. Just like light and dark, yin and yang, the good of technology is always accompanied by the evil dark side.
My prediction for 2018 is that AI and machine learning are going to be applied to hacking. AI's will be trained to write code to exploit all things and the exploits will be endless. Humans won't even be able to understand the exploit code as the AI software churns them out. Further I predict human cloning will happen this year and that China/Russia/North Korea will test some pretty nasty hacks on Americas Banks, Stock Market, Telecommunications, and/or gas/electric/water. I also predict that US drug usage will continue to increase (opioids, weed, alcohol) and the life expectancy will continue to decrease and suicide rates will continue to increase. I also predict that based on an increased energy in the atmosphere that storms will continue to grow in intensity. I also predict there will be a war in North Korea due to an error in a rocket test hitting a US ally. Further I predict Russia will take over another ex-Russian republic and China will continue to flex it's military muscle.
7 billion people on the planet. Technology everywhere, and we still can't figure out to behave and share.
I was watching TV with a little child and she was horrified by the war videos on the news and she asked me, "Why is there war? Why are they fighting?"
My answer, "Because, Sharing is hard."
To all reading this, in 2018 do a better job of sharing, loving your neighbor, and using less plastic.
Happy New Year!
I think the big test for us is coming up shortly. Technology is shifting from being a labor-saving device to a labor-eliminating device. And unlike previous shifts, the employment losses are going to be at all levels of intelligence. How we respond to this is going to be the difference between having a peaceful transition to a lower level of work and a revolution.
Take an example of a doctor. Doctors have a regulated profession and are therefore likely immune, but assume they don't. Right now, the selection criteria for medical school are a photographic memory (to ace the MCAT) and near-perfect academic performance in college. The current reason for this is to limit the number of medical students, and it makes sense to only take the best since they're in for a multi-year academic hazing. But in the age of Google, do doctors really have to have the entire body of medical knowledge accessible in their brains on demand?
At the low end, almost every middleman and paper-processing job will be eliminated. No great loss? How about the millions of people working for companies that have jobs like this? All of a sudden, they have zero income and zero ability to contribute to the workforce.
What I find frustrating is that anyone discussing this seems to get characterized as the Unabomber or similar, ranting against technology. Technology is fine...what we do with it needs to be looked at.
At least not in the book. In the book he's a gifted young student who starts down the road of science but is corrupted by his juvenile fascination with the occult.
You can see that Frankenstein was no scientist by the one thing that was never present in any of his plans: publication. Because that's really the defining characteristic of what a scientist is: he is someone who submits his work for others to critique and build upon. Science is about expanding humanity's understanding. Frankenstein was something different. Here is what he himself says:
I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.
So what Frankenstein wanted to be was something more like a wizard: not someone who advances knowledge through sharing, but someone whose possession of ancient and secret knowledge confers power on himself. And while he turns from studying occult books to science in his school career, he never stops thinking like or acting like an occultist.
I don't think that the novel is a cautionary tale about science; I think i'ts really a cautionary tale about romanticism. Frankenstein is pretty much undeniably a literary portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a man she was madly in love with for his prodigious charisma and intellect but could be cold and heartless toward people who weren't useful to him in his self-aggrandizement.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
When personal computing started, it was largely run by enthusiasts who envisioned how liberating it could be. Of course, it soon became a booming business run by the usual people, guided by the usual (lack of) ethics and entirely focused on profit (and therefore, consumer control). Later, people thought that Internet could render obsolete traditional tightly-controlled advertiser-directed media like television. Well, what do we now have? And is that the fault of software and programmers? Programmers are employees, and they do as they’re told. I doubt anyone grew up dreaming: “When I’m grown-up, I’ll be a DRM or spyware software developer!”
What is much more stunning is the herd mentality exhibited by the public, mindlessly embracing technology of really dubious benefit yet with very obvious drawbacks in terms of personal freedom. Are consumers ever stopping to wonder: “Wait a minute, what’d happen with this product if...?” No, instead, the mood is “Shut up and take my money!”
Is that the fault of software? Or is it our collective fault? And if children are trained to be dumb consumers, is it the fault of the device we place into their hands, the malicious applications that we let them use and the dumb content that we make available to them through those devices? Or is it the fault of their educators (that’s us) who deprive them from meaningful conversations about serious topics, and the chance to develop the ability to think deeply, have an educated, polite and fruitful conversation, cultivate intellectual curiosity and doubts, enhance their awareness of the real world around them, and treasure human values like charity?
Blaming software would be like blaming food, and the abundance of food. Yup, most of us are obese and sick. No, it’s not the fault of farmers or produce. We need to look in the mirror and begin to honestly appraise the fundamentals of how we live (and want to live) as individuals and operate as a society.