"We were nerds in our element, busily answering the challenge to create new technology that would benefit the world."
I think this is the problem. "Nerds" (only to reuse the term Kleinrock chose) like to think that we are above politics, that all that matters is the purity of the science of whatever we're creating.
But "politics" is just another word for "the interaction of people at scale". We are people who are building technology for people. We cannot forget that, without all these people in the mix, there is no point.
I will reiterate that to make myself clear: science with no regard for people is useless. Masturbation at best.
I think this one failure of thinking is what is responsible for a lot of the ills in our industry today. We have companies that exploit workers because workers are only thinking of the tech. We have products and services that exploit users because the people in the act of building them are only thinking about the tech.
I'm working in a field that has a similar blindness right now. In VR and AR, we recognize that there is a huge potential for good from our tech. And it's amazing tech to be working on. But only a few people are talking seriously about the potential for abuse. Combine the dream of AR tech with deep fakes and you've got a huge propaganda tool of the like we've never seen before. Even simple issues of making sure our tech doesn't physically harm people gets sloughed off as "oh, we'll figure that out later."
NO! We need to figure these things out now, before we lose the keys to the castle to the MBAs of the world. Right now, the industry isn't taken very seriously, it's mostly viewed as just a toy, or as only a tool for industrial process training and automation. It's basically the Internet all over again. We have a professional responsibility to get this right.
I don't agree with Kleinrock's intimation that competition is a bad thing. I think he isn't thinking clearly on just how competitive the academic environment can be, how competition is a redundancy that ensures robustness and drives innovation forward. The Space Race didn't advance for academics playing nicely together, it advanced for US academics trying to best USSR academics, and vice versa.
Given that Facebook is one of the biggest players in the field right now, we may have already lost.
We should be treating the Facebooks of the world as our generation's USSR. We should be competing against them in the most vigorous way possible. And we should be doing that not just with tech, but with politics. Educating people on the dangers of misused technology. Pushing forward safety regulation--both physical and information safety--just like the FAA requires safe designs before allowing mass production of any aircraft.
We have to get this right.