Imagine Robert T. Morris, the developer of the first internet worm, having been praised for “Morris” instead of been sentenced, as he was.
Imagine a car vendor making a huge press announcement about their latest model being highly unsafe, threatening people’s lives and being uncontrollable. The vendor would be cheered for being selfless and supportive by not releasing the model onto the market and people would flock at that vendor’s outlets to buy the available models. None of which have proven to be any safer, some of them, in the past, have even been advertised as being “way too dangerous for people to drive in”.
Imagine a weapons of mass destruction company making press announcements about their weapons being too dangerous to be used in the real world and that they would rather have all weapon producers to “slow it down a bit so we don’t accidentally kill ourselves with this race to arms”.
Imagine the head of a company that creates highly sophisticated products that are used to make life determining decisions, influence millions and millions of people around the world, judge over life and death eventually, in short, a company that anyone expects to think long and hard over anything they do for the sheer world dominating power their products have – imagine this CEO to publicly state they haven’t really thought anything complex lately as they consider rolling dice and basing their judgement on the outcome to be more reliable and responsible.
Imagine an IT specialist to be instructed to “safely and securely test a batch file that is supposed to delete a folder hierarchy fully automatically” and doing that on a system that has most other systems in the company mounted, not too untypically, under /mnt. The folder the specialist uses for the test scenario, for simplicity, is “/”. The script works fine. Imagine the company, after this “sandbox test”, to announce to the press that “their software has just developed its own intelligence and successfully removed almost all bugs throughout all software in the company” and the software “attacked other systems, it is so good!”. The company gets a defense contract for its genius. The IT specialist gets a raise.
Imagine a company that develops a product publicly discussing how their engineers don’t fully understand what their product is, how to make money from it (for which reason they need public funding, obviously), frequently advertising their product as “fundamentally dangerous to mankind”, “uncontrollable” and “lacking an off-switch”. The same company uses light switches to switch lights on and off, switch off the coffee machines when they leave office. That company demands “kill switches” for their products, because their engineers don’t understand how to stop a batch file that removes everything under a given folder. In short, imagine a company priding themselves on being “not up to the task they defined themselves”. Imagine that company paying the highest salaries.
Imagine a world where not knowing what you do is a job requirement. If you had been Robert T. Morris’s attorney, what would your closing argument be today?
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