Everything is Broken

Is legislation now the only solution?

An (somewhat expanded) transcript of a talk I gave at the FWD50 conference on digital government held in Ottawa, Canada, in November 2019. I talked there about privacy, security, and machine learning. Some additional material has been added for context, nothing has been removed from the talk as given.

Talking in the round on the stage at FWD50 on the 7th November 2019. (📷: FWD50 Conference Team)

Everything is broken, and it’s actually starting to sort of scare me that we’re not willing to acknowledge how bad things have become. It’s starting to scare me that the industry tends to have discussions about morals and ethics in bars, and sometimes in the hallways and dark corners at conferences, rather than in the harsh light of day. It’s really starting to scare me that nobody in the industry reads or understands history any more.

I’m beginning to think that courses in economics should be mandatory for all computer science students. Maybe history as well, real history, not the rote memorisation of lists of people and dates. It might add some sanity to the proceedings.

Because it’s almost back in pre-history now, at least when if you’re on Internet time, all the way back in 1972 in fact, when Alan Kay, one pioneers of the modern Internet, wrote,