Some people enter the technology industry to build newer, more exciting kinds of technology as quickly as possible. My keynote will savage these people and will burn important professional bridges, likely forcing me to join a monastery or another penance-focused organization. In my keynote, I will explain why the proliferation of ubiquitous technology is good in the same sense that ubiquitous Venus weather would be good, i.e., not good at all. Using case studies involving machine learning and other hastily-executed figments of Silicon Valley’s imagination, I will explain why computer security (and larger notions of ethical computing) are difficult to achieve if developers insist on literally not questioning anything that they do since even brief introspection would reduce the frequency of git commits. At some point, my microphone will be cut off, possibly by hotel management, but possibly by myself, because microphones are technology and we need to reclaim the stark purity that emerges from amplifying our voices using rams’ horns and sheets of papyrus rolled into cone shapes. I will explain why papyrus cones are not vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks, and then I will conclude by observing that my new start-up papyr.us is looking for talented full-stack developers who are comfortable executing computational tasks on an abacus or several nearby sticks. [more]
Overall the video is really enjoyable and you should watch it if you want to know why you should be critical about machine learning, internet of things and so on. One thing i would criticize is his conclusion that dumbness, laziness or technology fanatism is the reason of all this bad things happening in the technology sector. How is this society organized? Who provides services or creates products? Companies do. But what are their ultimate goals? What need they do to stay alive? Of course: Making more money out of money. This is the drive that leads to missing security, questionable ethics in software development and a lot of other stuff. This is something James Mickens misses and is not talking about: Money.
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