Headline July 28, 2017/ ''' \ *GOOD MORNING HACKS* / '''

''' \ *GOOD MORNING HACKS* / '''

IN PROGRAMMING NOTATION, say the master experts  -well,  Lawful! = Ethical. Clear on that, are we all?

"Good Afternoon, everyone!'' the professor calls out. ''Good Afternoon, John,'' some  40  students reply in feigned boredom.

This is John Basl, an engaging young bearded guy with  Bee Gees hair; he plainly oozes  Cool Teach. 

Jacob asks him what Westworld  episode he's on, and he replies, ''One.'' The hall resounds with  hair whitening shrieks.

Today's topic : Do we need to treat advanced  AIs  ethically?  For the next 100 minutes, Basl breaks down the different types of moral status and patiency, and whether we should invent strong AIs at all.

I wonder if learning about strong ontogeny nondiscrimination and substrate independence will help students, for instance, an employer asks them to do something fishy.

After all the nature of a   whitehat     -and ethics generally-  is context-dependent. A man some might consider the  ultimate whitehat,  Edward Snowden, stands officially condemned. [ Or in programming notation : lawful! =ethical.]

Later, Basl tells me that he is not trying to focus on  pros and cons specific issues , but instead offer tools for ethical thinking.

''I want them to leave with a sense that ethical questions, questions about how we ought to act or what is valuable, are very different from empirical and descriptive questions, questions about the way the world is.''

This is especially important with his students, whom he finds  ''extremely techno-optimistic; they believe that technology will inevitably develop, that technological possibilities will be realized.''

After class, David and I head to a cafe, where he continues to stonewall me on everything : politics, religion, class, dating life. At a time when young people are accused of oversharing.

I find his aversion to disclosure interesting. ''I, by default, am going to keep things private, and let it become public when there's sufficiently convincing reason for it to be public,'' he says. Like when?

''When it's beneficial in terms of career prospects.'' [One thing, more than any other, that he wants the world to know : ''Bug-bounty programs are good.''] 

Someone like David, who deeply understands and values privacy, shares only what he wants.

He's out here fixing bugs to secure our privacy' and all he asks for is some privacy of his own.

I propose we move out of the comfort zone. do something nonfactual : go to a fortune teller, a club, a hookah-bar. ''I don't have any interest in doing that, to be honest,'' he says. ''I'd rather go my room and work on my programming.''

On our way out, he swerves to pick up a tiny discarded receipt off the ground, then wanders even farther off to drop it carefully in a recycling bin.

On Friday night around 10, freshman are swearing loudly and sprinting a round a hallway that smells of burnt microwave popcorn.

Outside David's room, a drunk dude in a suit staggers around with a huge patch of dirt on his sleeve. It's the kind of  old monkeyshine that, under the menacing surveillance of social media, now carries the whiff of shit.

Even a momentary lapse of  unseemliness or unsightliness can live on forever , like herpes.

Not that the  Sthacks  are in a much danger of incrimination; as usual, they're just hanging out in Davis's room, hacking.

It seems like a good time to ask them about security  -more specifically, my security.

Ever since Snowden,  everyone I know has dwelled in a similar fatalistic confusion; we know that so much of our info is already out in the world   -all our humiliating correspondences,  our cash and  coordinates, our nipples-

Winners and booties     -that we shrug and do whatever's is inconvenient. Are we really at risk? 

And if so, can we do something about it?

Student Alec Bee : Age 19 : !WOW!

First Computer : It was a totally disgusting beige desktop. I believe it had a Pentium 3 in it, and around Windows 2000 or something like that.

Current Computer : Mt current build has an  R7 1700X and an R0 Nano.

Preferred Coding Language : Rust.

First Hack :  When I first installed  Linux, I managed to get a    PPPoE internet working. That was a pain. I was 12.

My Recent Hack : I threw together a bunch of hard drives and created a software  RAID 10 on a storage server.

And What Would You Do With A Trillion Dollars?

That's a lot of money!....................     First thing would be to connect everyone to the Internet...........all 7 Billion people.    Then it would be, you know, building out infrastructure in impoverished nations.

Dream First Job Out Of School : Something to do with making cool stuff.

Favorite Social Network : Can I say nothing? I use stuff like Reddit and HackerNews but I don't think I consider them social networks.

The Honour and Serving of the  Latest Operational research on  Technology and State of the World    continues.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the World. See Ya all on !WOW!   -the World Students Society and................. Twitter-!E-WOW!   -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Unguided Tour '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless