You may recall that at Google's inception its unofficial motto, and a formal statement in its Code Of Conduct, was "Do no evil". Did you realize they rescinded that two years ago?

So what? Well, maybe at the outset Google correctly anticipated what would be the breadth, depth and scope of their influence and they wanted to remind themselves that they would be a 'beneficent' company. Whatever their reasoning, why did they change it? Have they discovered the ultimate purposes of Alphabet may intersect somewhere with the set known as 'evil'?

This came to my attention while (inadvertently) watching the YouTube video below. The real subject is what computers can't do, and why. I found the discussion fascinating, even if the speaker is the fastest talking human I've ever heard outside of advertising. But aside from that he branched off into several other areas I particularly enjoy thinking about.

However he started the lecture with a short segment on Killer Robots. Initially it sounds like something far fetched to get you interested in the rest of his talk. But at 4:15 there's a punch line the audience laughs at, which in reality may not be so funny.

Listen to at least the first six minutes or so and see what you think. 

 

That was really interesting.

Turing did an amazing job on decrypting the Nazi Enigma machine. The code was too complicated to deterministically crack in a reasonable amount of time, so he came up with non-deterministic logic. This is essentially making the computer guess when it cannot really know. However, it worked often enough to make a difference because applying the guess was easily checked (the problem was in the set NP) and sometimes a message would be decrypted in time for the information contained within to be useful - e.g. rerouting a transatlantic convoy to avoid a U-boat wolfpack.

@Mr.Stu Glad you liked it. Yes Turing was a good one, if an odd sort of fellow. Lots of videos on code breaking up there as well.

Since every century has its share of evil despots I can't help but wonder how long will it be before one arises and gets ahold of some 21st century technology.

Or, what if the reincarnation of Lavrentiy Beria got ahold of Google and/or the NSA and made it work for his purposes?

We've seen the tip of that one already.

On 5/27/2020 at 5:12 PM, 45Doll said:

@Mr.Stu Glad you liked it. Yes Turing was a good one, if an odd sort of fellow. Lots of videos on code breaking up there as well.

Since every century has its share of evil despots I can't help but wonder how long will it be before one arises and gets ahold of some 21st century technology.

Or, what if the reincarnation of Lavrentiy Beria got ahold of Google and/or the NSA and made it work for his purposes?

We've seen the tip of that one already.

Look at the technology in other areas. I suspect the net result won’t be creating super villains, but that it will allow so much more of the bureaucracy to engage in evil with less effort and skill required.