11–20 of 184 posts
James Mickens is pure gold https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
He is like that in real life, too... I am in his department, and every single social event ends with him surrounded by a group of people, listening to his hilarious rants. At the same time, he's a great teacher, too. Somehow you learn things while listening to 90 minutes of his stand-up comedy.
"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." For anyone who hasn't heard a James Mickens talk, do…
James Mickens is pure gold https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
Regarding the "we don't know how this stuff works" point, doesn't the FDA approve a ton of drugs where we don't know the exact mechanism of how it works? Do we need to know exactly and precisely how something works to know _that_ it works?
Sidestepping comedy for a bit, there are a lot of inscrutable systems that we connect to 'things that matter' all the time. The financial systems themselves are pretty damn inscrutable. Corporations are very often inscrutable.
By contrast, there is nothing remotely resembling a human mind anywhere in machine learning, and the failure modes are often, by our standards, insane (like thinking a picture of random noise is a cat). That creates a whole new level of danger when connecting to "things that matter".
And to the extent we already connect inscrutable systems to things that matter, we should be trying to make that problem better, not worse. "When you're in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging"
"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." For anyone who hasn't heard a James Mickens talk, do…
He's the guy who wrote the Slow Winter. He's hilarious. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1309_14-17_mickens.pdf
More true than ever, now.
Regarding the "we don't know how this stuff works" point, doesn't the FDA approve a ton of drugs where we don't know the exact mechanism of how it works? Do we need to know exactly and precisely how something works to know _that_ it works?
Technology companies churn out things with barely a few weeks of testing at times and no oversight.