Kelly.Manning@ncf.ca
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2017 21:50:37 -0400 (EDT)
The 2017 March 15 RISKS items about automation, fast-food service, and
Dangerous industrial robots brought back a memory of "Intent to Deceive" by
Larry Niven. Note the title.
It is always interesting to hear from Dr. Leveson. My father started working life in his early teens as an early 1940s whistle punk at a coastal BC logging camp. Her high pressure steam analogy of the state of software safety had a personal resonance for me. Steam punk has taken on a different meaning these days.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=IBDAL13yLAUC&pg=PA34&dq=whistle+punk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwistfKC9N7SAhVUVWMKHcj6AzcQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=whistle%20punk&f=false
http://www.obooksbooks.com/2015/3984_2.html#
"And then I remember that he went into a fully automated kitchen, through
a door that wasn't built for humans. That kitchen machinery could handle
full-sized sides of beef. Dreamer obviously wasn't a robot. What would the
kitchen machinery take him for?"
Science Fiction writer Frederick Pohl also anticipated a number of potential future risks when he was working as an advertising executive during the day while writing science fiction during his spare time. With the move to displays in cars and Internet connections we might have to be wary of situations were advertisements could distract drivers in cars, although not yet with our aircars.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=JCVbAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=safety+cranks
"They listened to the safety cranks and stopped us from projecting our
messages on aircar windows--but we bounced back. ... soon we'll be testing
a system that projects direct on the retina"
Science Fiction has a long history of portraying "Mad Men in Space".
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/advertising
If you think this is far fetched consider why ad blockers are so popular, and recall that at least one Internet home firewall maker decided to interrupt browser sessions periodically by redirecting browsers to one of their corporate web sites. Why worry about your network equipment being hacked with corporations behaving like that?
Pohl's novel divides the population into two classes, executives and everybody else. Other science fiction stories view automation as leading to divisions such as taxpayers and citizens.
As Analog Magazine told us in 1990, Future Shock is the sense of
bewilderment felt by those who were not paying attention. (volume 110, page
67)