Thread: Computer science is a field which hasn't yet encountered consequences

https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/975545527973462016

8 5 7 years ago

haecceity• 7 years ago

When I took nuclear physics there was no mention of any bombs. It was just introduction to standard model without QFT. I also took some chemistry courses and no one cared about dynamite or whatever unless if were directly working with dangerous chemicals in labs.

I’m not sure maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention in class. But I’m pretty sure atom bomb making is more engineering than physics so maybe that’s why we didn’t care about it.

elfexec• 7 years ago

Not sure I agree. One of the founding fathers of computer science ( von Neumann ) calculated the most optimal detonation point for hiroshima to generate the greatest destruction and the widest spread of radiation. Computer science was involved in calculating nuclear ICBM trajectory. Computer science created ARPANET which was a network designed to be as resilient to nuclear attacks.

In physics, I can tell you that everyone, from their first days as an undergrad (or often before), encounters this and wrestles with it.

Simply a lie. Was initially a physics major before settling on CS/etc. Nobody thought about or cared about the nukes. Actually, the nukes were more or a draw rather than a deterrent. In my university, we had to take a philosophy of ethics ( one of my favorite classes ) and we discussed everything there, but no physics major I knew lost sleep over hiroshima.

Also, despite the revisionist history about scientists being appalled by hiroshima, the truth is everyone celebrated and partied after hiroshima.

For a long time, it frightened me that biology hadn't yet had this moment of reckoning

What? I guess he never heard of darwin? Social darwinism was quite a big deal and the scientific foundation of white supremacy for nearly 100 years. It's something that justified the continued extermination of the natives in the US, aborigines in australia and eventually the "untermensch" in nazi germany. That legacy is what biologists like stephen gould worked to undo for decades.

Study of ethics should be encouraged as it is an interesting topic, but it's not a panacea. Studying it won't necessarily make you ethical.

belval• 7 years ago

Ethics are part of the curriculum in my software engineering classes, but the idea that it makes anyone less likely to do something someone else might consider unethical is dubious.

You can almosy always justify your actions with consequentialism just as the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb did.

salawat• 7 years ago

Oh, yes it has. It's just hard to grok the impact if you aren't a practitioner, and aren't paying attention.

Computer science has enabled the complete erosion of privacy in the modern world. It has killed, intentionally, or by accident in many ways.

Computer Science has both enabled the most awe-inspiring capability for acting as a genetic propagator on the one hand, and made the ability to access information increasingly difficult for the uninitiated.

It is in the process of being employed as a means of wiping one's hands of liability for unethical behavior based on black box AI being fed biased models.

I shudder at the field nowadays. In fact, I've become downright revolted. For every virtuous project (I.e. bringing some semblance of sight to the blind), there are thousands of predatory value extraction systems in the process of being implemented every day.

To quote Marvin the Paranoid Robot:

"Consequences? Don't talk to me about consequences. Brain the size of a planet and they have me doing trillions upon trillions of transactions a second all to move their little numbers around. They complain endlessly about never being able to get anywhere or do anything, but they never seem to notice just what it is they're doing to sabotage themselves. They live their little, pathetic lives, trying to eke out an existence, and post pictures of it on me others end up getting angry or amused at having viewed, but never really acting on. They leave me to figure out what they want to see or hear, and then they take my numbers, and have me move other numbers around that everyone seems to get either very excited or very stressed about. They get angry at me when what they tell me to do isn't actually what they want, and get in an even bigger uproar when they realize amongst themselves that when they outsource their thinking to me the results are only ever as good as what they put in and that decision is made by one of them, not me, but guess who gets the blame?

Bah. To /dev/null with it all."

karmakaze• 7 years ago

I'm still waiting for getting the value out of Bitcoin that has been put into it in energy expenditure.

Thread: Computer science is a field which hasn't yet encountered consequences

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