Tech Nightmares That Keep Turing Award Winners Up At Night 82
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.'"
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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.
Brains (Score:1)
The danger is that those of us with brains aren't the ones who become politicians.
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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.
Blue LEDs (Score:5, Funny)
Javascript (Score:2)
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Javascript keeps me up at night...
Tell it to go to bed and debug itself in the morning...
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Javascript keeps me up at night...
Close your fucking browser then.
Of course the world is safer. (Score:2, Insightful)
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 t
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...most of them are better off than we were before our brains evolved to their current state.
That was my initial reaction when I read that quote. However, was he talking about the safety of humans or of the world in general? While humans are certainly safer now, we have caused a good deal of destruction to the rest of the biosphere. There is certainly some evidence that the world is more dangerous for other species now that humans have evolved brains capable of changing so much so quickly.
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reply to remove incorrect mod (Score:2)
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"'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.'"
I, for one, welcome our computer overlords.
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In an urban area, you only need one skill: Cunning. You can have zero skills whatsoever, but if you can lie convincingly, you can eke out an existence in a city with relatively little effort. If one watering hole dries up, there are many other cities and a Greyhound bus to go to another one, and GoFundMe to cover any costs in between.
Re: Of course the world is safer. (Score:2)
The nightmare keeping these people awake when they should be soundly asleep is the fact that AI is a product of human intellect capable of replicating all the flawed logic, errors and omissions as humans. Except now it is running in digital time at orders of magnitude speeds beyond human comprehension in digital scale worldwide in digital systems unintelligible in control of our lives in financial, transportation, health and human safety. What could go wrong?
Here's my nightmare (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
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'The fact that we have brains (Score:3)
'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....
Society/Culture, Not Tech (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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What I'm concerned about is not really automation. If a robot welder can do the job better than a person, it means fewer people get injured.
What concerns me is the general move to more and more population-dense cities, but there isn't really the infrastructure to support it, and there isn't the interest by government or business to build it. Business is more than happy to build the absolute minimum required to sell their products, but beyond that, it is out of their scope, and they would be subject to sha
Safest it's ever been (Score:5, Interesting)
"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 [huffingtonpost.com].
People are, on average, living longer, healthier lives [who.int].
Poverty is declining [worldbank.org], if only slightly.
And so on... never been a better time than right now.
=Smidge=
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Unless you're a non-human. Then the world is a very dangerous place.
http://www.livescience.com/335... [livescience.com]
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Maybe for individuals. For species, the 'tasty' adaptation ensures they will flourish in numbers impossible without human aid, and spread to almost every continent and island.
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SPECIES are dying off, not just individuals.
The world is not safer for anyone, including humans, if you look at it from a slightly bigger perspective. i.e. what happens to humans when we kill off bees?
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That's a long term perspective.
The short term is that most of humanity will starve off. Adaptation can often be a cruel mistress.
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Yeah, I'm sure that'll happen right quick.
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Bees are in that Tasty adaptation. They produce honey, which makes them valued as a "farm animal". People raise and maintain hives, which are used by farmers to fertilize their crops.
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And yet they're falling at a precipitous rate.
http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/d... [usda.gov]
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The answer being that beekeepers replace the majority (if not all) of those lost hives each summer. If you want to track this you need to look at how many hi
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Agreed. While we have certainly improved ways to harm ourselves, the simple fact is that we've doubled the average life expectancy in the last 220 years. I think the question of whether or not the world is safer is self-evident. Even smart people can say something dumb every once in awhile. I do it all the time!
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Actually it was a lyrical reference to RHCP not RATM, but I like the way you think.
=Smidge=
Safer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I did notice that almost all the coverage from the US was focused on the possibility of it traveling to the US. No-one there seemed to much care about an epidemic halfway around the world, but the news channels carried a constant stream of fear about it coming to America.
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You might want to check the crime stats for Liberia AC.
They would LOVE to have our gun violence problem.
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Safer, better and happier are three very different things. Blum said safer.
Unlike better and happier, safer can be objectively measured and we are definitely safer.
quote from the cryptography expert (Score:2)
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."
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Put him on a list, and see if he likes it then.
On a completely unrelated note, experts often have myopic views of the world at large.
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This to me is by far the most worrying development of recent years, especially when combined with the incendiary tidal wave of spontaneous twitter and social media lynch mobs out there. Say the wrong thing, get taken out of context, or be mistaken from someone else and millions of strangers will make it their mission to ruin your life. Kids for example do stupid and immoral things, not neccessarily criminal, maybe just risible. Today their juvenile mistakes can be broadcast instantly to a self propelled glo
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Star Wars Kid? That you?
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Personally, I've got darn little to hide. A few medical issues I'd rather not discuss in public, covered by HIPAA, and a few other things. I'm not really worried about surveillance right now. I carry my phone everywhere, use my credit card for almost everything, that sort of thing.
However, I'd really like to preserve the ability to do things that the surveillance state doesn't know about. Currently, I don't need it. I don't foresee needing it. If I do need to do something covert, I'm likely to real
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Yup. Now, since the crypto expert brought up the Boston marathon bombings, let's remember the poor innocent guy who was immediately accused of being the bomber, and what happened to him. That's what surveillance can do. Without it, the police would have had to find the Tsarnaevs using police work, but there wouldn't have been the media lynching.
The priesthood (Score:2)
This is deeply religious thread, all affectations of cleverness aside.
IPv6 (Score:1)
IPv6 ought to keep Vint Cerf up at night, as he played a central role in that monumental fiasco.
IPv6 is working perfectly (Score:1)
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 talki
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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.
As of 2014, IPv4 still carries more than 99% of worldwide Internet traffic. [wikipedia.org] By any definition, that is a fiasco. Imagine if Microsoft introduced a new version of Windows and after 20 years, the old version was still being used for 99% of computer work. Would we call that a fiasco? We sure would. Now, some loose cannon with mod points apparently thinks that Vint Cerf's shit does not stink like that.
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You appear to misunderstand the nature of IPv6 deployment. It was never intended to be a sudden switchover, but a gradual phasing out of the old and bringing in of the new, occurring as old equipment gets upgraded and as new IP address blocks are requested. Nobody was ever going to be kicked off IPv4 while they have valid IPv4 addresses and while it still works for them.
You should also have quot
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about 13% of web servers supporting IPv6...As of September 2013, over 33% of all users on Verizon had IPv6.
... Your alleged "fiasco" is nowhere to be seen.
Hah. It's a huge indictment that even with 13% of web servers supporting it, only 1% of traffic goes over it. That means that when users have the choice they choose something else.
Another sign of failure is when the defenders get shrill. You are shrill.
There is exactly one thing that will get people to use IPv6, and that is, forcing them. No choice. Take it or fuck yourself. Which has basically been the deployment strategy, brainchild of Vint Cerf. Even with that... 20 years later... 1%. Feh.
Imagine what co