Lynn Conway, leading computer scientist and transgender pioneer, dies at 85
Lynn Conway, leading computer scientist and transgender pioneer, dies at 85
Lynn Conway, who died Sunday at 85, was a leader in the development of personal computers and microprocessor technology, and a symbol for generations of transgender individuals.
I have mixed feelings on the pronoun use, but having read some of her autobiographical writing I don't think she would have taken much issue with it. This piece is more focused on her work in computer engineering, so I felt it was appropriate to post here.
You're viewing a single thread.
Fantastic! She was a huge part of the military-industrial complex in computing and her entire work has to be viewed through that lens. While her contributions to the field are numerous and incredibly meaningful, she also wanted to help the military develop machine intelligence and is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children.
If you're serious, please elaborate on your points. I genuinely don't understand.
Going by Wikipedia here,
She was a huge part
Please define huge part. She was a "key architect" in the starting years of a project that fell short of its goals.
her entire work has to be viewed through that lens
Why? It was, relatively speaking, an almost small part of her career. She didn't stay until the end of the project. You even admit that her contributions to the field were many and meaningful.
is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children
This feels like such a huge leap, that I don't even know where to begin tackling it. Is Tim Berners Lee in every explicit way connected to the modern privacy hellscape that is the modern internet?
Make no mistake, if she really did want to help develop artificial intelligence for the military's sake, fuck her. I can respect someone's achievements while also thinking they're trash as a person.
But I don't think that's the case here, and I'm lost as to what point, exactly, you're trying to make.
These are great questions! Rather than pull individual citations, I’ll point you at these books
- Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine
- The Pentagon’s Brain by Annie Jacobson
- The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberg
Your last point, suggesting that it’s possible to take DARPA money without intentionally developing weapons, is part of the whitewashing we’ve done of computing that’s incredibly wrong. Make no mistake, I am directly saying a majority of computing pioneers in the US are trash people while respecting their achievements. Their work was done explicitly under the knowledge it was for military purposes. Levine has a few great anecdotes about engineers watching protestors and asking for extra security.
Your example of Berners-Lee is an interesting one. He’s trash for modern opinions. I don’t know much about the military history, if any, of CERN, so I don’t know their culpability. Conway took DARPA money and architected DARPA projects. That’s her culpability, unless you’re able to show she was coerced and didn’t know about the widely discussed military connections scientists had to know to write their grants for funding?
Edit: fixed the Weinberger link
I won't know if any of the linked resources are any good until I have time to look them over, but if nothing else I appreciate you taking the time to answer.
Re: whitewashing, fair point. I'd already read about the issue, but maybe I still need to rethink how I look at computing history.
If you’ve read stuff like Hackers by Levy or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner, there’s a very happy, “look at this cool shit we built” attitude to everything (both books are fantastic and worth the read). Levy’s Crypto begins to dance around some of the dangers when he writes about Diffie-Hellman. MIT AI especially has its roots in this gnarly defense world even though it’s usually portrayed as anything but. The amount of computing used for RAND to support the war in Vietnam is terrible.
Sometimes you have to develop defensive or offensive capabilities, and how they’re used are the responsibility of politicians. You’ll have to accept that some citizens support the actions of the politicians to use defensive or offensive capabilities.
If the non-war side has convincing arguments other than shaming based on assumed moral superiority, then they should suggest alternatives for dealing with aggressive sociopaths (Putin attacking Ukraine, for example) or any number of examples of violent extremism in history from [insert your ideological enemy].
Humans are still operating on a primitive model to kill opponents instead of alternative ways to deal with them, and blaming one scientist for that ill of society doesn’t make sense. Her contributions to science are separate from the sociopolitical issues under which they came about.
Man makes fire and farming. Is subsequently responsible for every death known to man.
How dare they!
Did man write grants to show how said fire had military applications? If so, how dare they! If not your straw man is kinda lacking.
Fire cook food. Fire also kill...
So no, it's really not lol. Most people smart enough to invent shit know that in can be used for evil. That doesn't mean we shouldn't use nuclear energy. There is nuance behind advancing civilization.
The people intelligent enough to make these things are usually looking far beyond anyone else and the military's money is just as good as anyones.
If you’re writing a grant illustrating its military applications I don’t really care what else you want to use it for. Looks like we disagree about intention so have fun with that.