http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/us/31cyber.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
Not a good sign, in my opinion. I work for an Artificial Intelligence company. It's a French company, founded by a man who refused to do what most AI researchers in the world do and work on military applications for AI. We do business, and occasionally even do software that improves the environment. The software I work on helps to optimize the use of electricity here in Spain, and regulates the consumption of water. It's a fascinating company to work for, prim- arily because of the awesome level of talent and intelligence I get to work with. ILOG gets something like a hundred resumes a month, from the top Ph.D. graduates in the field of AI all over the world. As a result they can "pick and choose" from among them, and hire only the best. But one of the *reasons* they get so many great resumes is that ILOG is one of the few places on the planet where an AI expert can get paid for doing what he loves without working on megadeath. Most of the AI on the planet is in the field of weapons research and development. I knew and drank with a lot of these people when I lived in Santa Fe. They worked "up the hill" at the National Labs in Los Alamos. What exactly they worked *on* was never a topic of conversa- tion. It would have been treason to speak of it, especially during the Bush era. But what working on such projects DID to the people I knew was obvious. These were remarkably talented and intelligent people who were making a living by inventing newer and more efficient ways to kill their fellow human beings, and in the process working daily on becoming less and less human themselves. I've known other such talented people who worked for defense contractors in California, and saw the same soullessness in them. Now the same thing is going to happen with young computer nerds. Yes, there is a need for an awareness of the potential dangers of cyberwarfare. Bringing down the Internet could render the US or any other country defenseless. But at the same time, I shudder to think of the life that awaits these young computer nerds work- ing for soulless defense contractors who will milk their talents just to make a buck, and entice them to discover newer and better ways to crash computers instead of making computers work better. During the Cold War, several generations of great minds were lured away from performing "life affirm- ing" or "life enhancing" work and into a life spent inventing newer and better ways to kill people. During the upcoming Cold Cyberwar, more generations of aspiring computer scientists are going to be equally lured away from life affirming work and into the well-paying but soul-draining work of computers as weapons, rather than computers as helpers. Marshall McLuhan used to say, "Man shapes his tools, but thereafter his tools shape him." And that is true, in the sense that we have now become so dependent on computers as tools that we cannot conceive of living without them, and perceive any threat to their existence as warfare. But at the same time man continues to shape the tools and pervert them into his own image. The puny mind of man loves war, and thus has turned the tool of computer science into just another opportunity to wage war.
