November 2016 - Simon Griffee

On Saying No #: Evan Osnos on John Chiang’s refusal to accept an order by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

When I asked him what lesson he takes from his refusal to obey the orders of the executive, he said, “I think, always, you look deep into your conscience and then you move from there. People have a sense of why they serve.” He added, “At times, we will prevail; at times, we will fail. But to stand and watch idly and do nothing—I think people will regret if things go along and they didn’t offer up their very best.”

Who Will Command The Robot Armies? #

Maciej Cegłowski:

Most of you know that the word “robot” comes from a 1920 play by Karel Čapek.

I finally read this play and was surprised to learn that the robots in it were not mechanical beings. They were made of flesh and bone, just like people, except that were assembled instead of being born.

Čapek’s robots resemble human beings but don’t feel pain or fear, and focus only on their jobs.

In other words, they’re the ideal employee.

…

Nobody wants the responsibility; everybody wants the control.

Resilience #

Jeremy Keith:

You probably heard that the Internet was created to withstand a nuclear attack, right? A network that would be resilient to withstanding a nuclear attack, and that’s actually not quite true. What is true is that Paul Baran, who was at the Rand Corporation, was looking into what is the most resilient shape of a network. And amongst his findings, one of the things he discovered was that by splitting up your information into discrete packages, it made for a more resilient network, and this is where this idea of packet switching comes from that you take the entire message, chop it up into little packets, and then you ship those packets around the network by whatever route happens to be best and then reassemble them at the other end.

…

Now what’s interesting is that, Bob Kahn and Vince Cerf, back then they weren’t concerned about making the network resilient to nuclear attack. They were young, idealistic men, and what they were concerned about was making a network that was resilient to any kind of top down control, so that was kind of baked into the design of these protocols that the network would have no centre. The network has no single decision point. You don’t have to ask to add a node to the network. You can just do it.