Monday, August 27, 2012

The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html?ref=carousel
"I gave a talk in late 2011 at 28C3 in Berlin called "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing"
In a nutshell, its hypothesis was this:
• Computers and the Internet are everywhere and the world is increasingly made of them.
• We used to have separate categories of device: washing machines, VCRs, phones, cars, but now we just have computers in different cases. For example, modern cars are computers we put our bodies in and Boeing 747s are flying Solaris boxes, whereas hearing aids and pacemakers are computers we put in our body.
• This means that all of our sociopolitical problems in the future will have a computer inside them, too—and a would-be regulator saying stuff like this:
"Make it so that self-driving cars can't be programmed to drag race"
"Make it so that bioscale 3D printers can't make harmful organisms or restricted compounds"
Which is to say: "Make me a general-purpose computer that runs all programs except for one program that freaks me out." .....

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