Wow. This is absolutely boss, so true, and a wonderful share. As a Catholic South African with a Jewish great grandad on Mum’s side, I have always been supportive of Israel and her nationhood.
No hate speech will dim her beacon of hope and light in an increasingly unsettled world situation.
Kindest regards and the deepest respect for job and peace seekers worldwide
Irina, kudos to you for finishing on a hopeful note, so often (and understandably) rare when discussing or writing about our past and present struggles as Jews in this world.
Great essay! And because of Jewish engagement with cutting edge technologies, there are Jewish people who have a better grasp of how they work and therefore how to address the problems they create. If Jews were only engaged in the study of Torah and commerce, and not new technology, medicine, civics and human behavior,etc., we would not be in a position to help direct the technologies in a positive direction.
I was a software engineer for 25 years, but my first education was in the arts and humanities; I came to engineering late after I couldn't find work. Throughout my engineering career, I always asked myself how what I was working on could be misused to hunt Jews, and I refused to work on projects where I could foresee that kind of trouble. Generally that means I quit jobs when they asked me to work on projects that violated privacy or that involved data mining. There were long-term economic consequences to this policy and I didn't care. I am the only engineer I ever met who refused to work on software on the basis that it could be misused and that it was potentially evil. Most engineers don't know much about history or other humanities, so they literally could not imagine anything beyond kool factor. Just as people who only study humanities are hamstrung in the market by their ignorance of math and science, people who only study math and science are hamstrung in life by not knowing how their work can be misused ethically. Every innovator needs to remember that power corrupts, and an invention that gives power puts the onus on the user to use their power wisely. My colleagues always said, "Well if I don't work on it someone else will, I might as well profit from it" which I thought was lame. These are quandaries every innovator should consider.
I used to have a friend at the MIT Media Lab who worked on the foundations of social media, so he was part of the team that invented it. And he had always found it difficult to get a date. He envisioned social media as a solution to his social problems, a place where he could find like-minded people. Social media did solve just that problem. It's just that the other problems it created, like people hunted for their demographics, these problems were at the time unimaginable, because the world is so complex.
There is a lesson to be learned in this. When software started out, you could keep an entire program in your head, you could know all the ins and outs, you could anticipate and solve problems. Over the course of my career, a single program became just a small cog in an "ecosystem," dispersed across the globe, using innumerable libraries, disparate databases, servers and protocols, chaining services that you the writer may never have anticipated, and as "Just in time innovation" meant that anything you're using could be updated at any time, it became impossible to keep everything in your head; it became impossible to know what was going on in every library, every connection, every part of the program. Presumably error handling is designed in (although over time I observed that practices of error handling got much weaker), but the fact remains that chaos is now a part of any complicated system. We literally cannot understand all the ins and outs of how it works. The complexity of software is now like the complexity of life.
Ultimately anything we do, anything we innovate, as soon as it leaves us we have no control over it. Whether it is used for good or for evil depends on the ethics, wisdom and integrity of the greater culture. As our culture loses its moorings, we all are indeed screwed.
“What hath God wrought?" I doubt the Jewish internet czars mentioned care one bit for the damage created to civilization by their enterprise as long as the money keeps rolling in. Note for example, that Zuckerberg suddenly wanted to make nice with Trump after his re-election because he doesn't want his company to be either broken up or destroyed. As for Iran, under the present regime of Mad Mullahs they will continue to pursue nuclear weapons unless they are thrown out of office or killed by their long-suffering population.
Joseph told the wine bearer that his dream meant Pharaoh would let him out of prison in three days and restore him to his position. And he added: "Please, when you are restore, mention me to Pharaoh?"
Wow. This is absolutely boss, so true, and a wonderful share. As a Catholic South African with a Jewish great grandad on Mum’s side, I have always been supportive of Israel and her nationhood.
No hate speech will dim her beacon of hope and light in an increasingly unsettled world situation.
Kindest regards and the deepest respect for job and peace seekers worldwide
Carol Power
Johannesburg
South Africa
Irina, kudos to you for finishing on a hopeful note, so often (and understandably) rare when discussing or writing about our past and present struggles as Jews in this world.
Excellent and informative essay. I was unaware of Albert Kahn's massive contributions towards Henry Ford's success.
Great essay! And because of Jewish engagement with cutting edge technologies, there are Jewish people who have a better grasp of how they work and therefore how to address the problems they create. If Jews were only engaged in the study of Torah and commerce, and not new technology, medicine, civics and human behavior,etc., we would not be in a position to help direct the technologies in a positive direction.
‘Eating the Forbidden Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge’. Always problematic.
How appropriate that the muslim capital of America is Dearborn.
...........................................................................................................................................................................................
Ford, the most prominent of the early automotive pioneers, also was publisher of the infamous antisemitic newspaper “The Dearborn Independent,”
I was a software engineer for 25 years, but my first education was in the arts and humanities; I came to engineering late after I couldn't find work. Throughout my engineering career, I always asked myself how what I was working on could be misused to hunt Jews, and I refused to work on projects where I could foresee that kind of trouble. Generally that means I quit jobs when they asked me to work on projects that violated privacy or that involved data mining. There were long-term economic consequences to this policy and I didn't care. I am the only engineer I ever met who refused to work on software on the basis that it could be misused and that it was potentially evil. Most engineers don't know much about history or other humanities, so they literally could not imagine anything beyond kool factor. Just as people who only study humanities are hamstrung in the market by their ignorance of math and science, people who only study math and science are hamstrung in life by not knowing how their work can be misused ethically. Every innovator needs to remember that power corrupts, and an invention that gives power puts the onus on the user to use their power wisely. My colleagues always said, "Well if I don't work on it someone else will, I might as well profit from it" which I thought was lame. These are quandaries every innovator should consider.
I used to have a friend at the MIT Media Lab who worked on the foundations of social media, so he was part of the team that invented it. And he had always found it difficult to get a date. He envisioned social media as a solution to his social problems, a place where he could find like-minded people. Social media did solve just that problem. It's just that the other problems it created, like people hunted for their demographics, these problems were at the time unimaginable, because the world is so complex.
There is a lesson to be learned in this. When software started out, you could keep an entire program in your head, you could know all the ins and outs, you could anticipate and solve problems. Over the course of my career, a single program became just a small cog in an "ecosystem," dispersed across the globe, using innumerable libraries, disparate databases, servers and protocols, chaining services that you the writer may never have anticipated, and as "Just in time innovation" meant that anything you're using could be updated at any time, it became impossible to keep everything in your head; it became impossible to know what was going on in every library, every connection, every part of the program. Presumably error handling is designed in (although over time I observed that practices of error handling got much weaker), but the fact remains that chaos is now a part of any complicated system. We literally cannot understand all the ins and outs of how it works. The complexity of software is now like the complexity of life.
Ultimately anything we do, anything we innovate, as soon as it leaves us we have no control over it. Whether it is used for good or for evil depends on the ethics, wisdom and integrity of the greater culture. As our culture loses its moorings, we all are indeed screwed.
So we need to design the countermeasure before we even release it?
“What hath God wrought?" I doubt the Jewish internet czars mentioned care one bit for the damage created to civilization by their enterprise as long as the money keeps rolling in. Note for example, that Zuckerberg suddenly wanted to make nice with Trump after his re-election because he doesn't want his company to be either broken up or destroyed. As for Iran, under the present regime of Mad Mullahs they will continue to pursue nuclear weapons unless they are thrown out of office or killed by their long-suffering population.
It’s their Shi’ism ideology that perpetuates their actions.
As such, you cannot negotiate with them.
Self-preservation dictates our actions.
Another casualty of the revelations from the angel Lucifer collectively.
Joseph told the wine bearer that his dream meant Pharaoh would let him out of prison in three days and restore him to his position. And he added: "Please, when you are restore, mention me to Pharaoh?"
The wine bearer forgot.
Enough said.
I have a response to those that weaponize our genius against us in the second part of this essay, called “Too Fucking Bad”.
https://substack.com/@avitaranto/note/p-178432095?r=22723&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Don't forget Hedi Lamar the brilliant gorgeous movie star invented frequency jumping that ultimately led to wifi
"Genius"?
Bhahahahaah!