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Lynn Conway, leading computer scientist and transgender pioneer, dies at 85 (www.latimes.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 13 points 2 years ago (3 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.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    These are great questions! Rather than pull individual citations, I’ll point you at these books

    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

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    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.

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