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As Robert Oppenheimer watched a mushroom cloud from the first nuclear detonation bloom over a New Mexico test site, he repeated a line from the Hindu epic Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The scientist who helped build the world’s most lethal weapon saw how physicists would forever confront the consequences of their discoveries.
Today, computer scientists are contemplating their own “A-bomb moment.” Facebook’s carelessness with user data, and the attacks the company has enabled against western democracies, are on software engineers’ consciences.
“Computer science is a field which hasn’t yet encountered consequences,” writes Yonatan Zunger, a former security and privacy engineer at Google, who has compared the power in the hands of software engineers to “kids in a toy shop full of loaded AK-47’s.” Safety and ethics are still elective, rather than foundational, to software design.
Other fields have already had to reckon with such ethics. Chemistry’s discovery of dynamite and chemical weapons, and biology’s rationale for eugenics, prompted the creation of institutional review boards, mid-career certification, and professional codes of conduct. But software engineering is different. Coders are neither a profession nor a society in the traditional sense. Many are self-taught, and many have a healthy skepticism of any effort to corral the profession toward consensus.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Technology mediates almost every aspect of our lives. Machines recognize speech and written text. Algorithms can recognize your face, as well as infer from data (with increasing accuracy) your gender, income, creditworthiness, mental health, and personality.
Tech companies already obsess over reliability—gaming out the “what-ifs” to prevent computer systems from crashing. Zunger says they need to apply the same planning to human consequences. “If you can do it without wanting to hide under a table, you’re not thinking hard enough,” he writes. “There are worse failure modes, and they’re coming for you.”—Michael J. Coren
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Pickup-truck-loving Americans can thank the chicken. The biggest, most profitable segment of the US auto market exists largely because the country has effectively blocked foreign competition, Gwynn Guilford reports. Donald Trump’s new deal with South Korea extends the “Chicken Tax,” a steep 25% tariff on pickups that goes back to a 1963 trade war with Germany over selling American birds abroad.
The incredible global reach of Cambridge Analytica’s parent. In the scandal that won’t stop, Devjyot Ghoshal finds that SCL Group—parent company of the political consulting firm caught up in a Facebook data-harvesting mess in the US and UK—lays claim to a much wider global reach. Company documents show SCL has worked in 32 countries around the world.
China’s falling space lab is a prism for its space dreams. Launched in 2011, the Tiangong-1 craft coming back to Earth soon, in pieces, represents a key step toward the permanent station Beijing hopes to put into orbit. It also symbolizes how China is determined to one day outpace rival powers in space, Echo Huang writes, including with ambitious plans for the moon and Mars.
Why Morocco is the new investment capital of Africa. As economies like Nigeria’s and Angola’s recover from oil-price declines, northern Africa stands as the better bet for investors drawn to the continent’s economic promise, Yomi Kazeem reports. Morocco—joined by Egypt and Algeria atop the 2018 Africa Investment Index—has a growing reputation for a welcoming environment.
Spies are glued to screens, just like us. Since the end of the Cold War, clandestine operatives have traded their trick briefcases for far more pedestrian tools, such as computer networks and data visualizations. With screen-based drudgery now dominating the trade, Anne Quito recounts how a new spy museum designed by celebrated British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye succeeds in capturing how boring the world of espionage has become.
Gender-neutral baby names are on the rise in the US. As a growing number of American parents opt for names that are associated with both boys and girls, Nikhil Sonnad combs through Social Security Administration data and finds that names like “Charlie” and “Blake” are driving this shift, illustrating “just how fluid the culture around gender can be.”
Five things elsewhere that made us smarter
Wheat can be grown in the African heat. Viewed as a cold-climate crop, most wheat is harvested in the Northern Hemisphere. By testing thousands of varieties in sub-Saharan warmth, Mark Hillsdon writes in The Guardian, scientists hit upon a way to cultivate a fast-growing strain in a region desperate to improve food security.
How Facebook helps pollute the internet. In the scammy world of online affiliate marketing, “anyone who lacks scruples and knows how to access the system can begin to wreak havoc or earn money at astonishing scale,” Zeke Faux reveals in Bloomberg Businessweek. One example: a Polish coder who built a lucrative tool to target ads for diet pills, free iPhones, brain supplements, and other misleading schemes.
Trump actually is helping China. For nearly 50 years, the US has tried to tempt Beijing into playing nicely with the global economy. It hasn’t worked perfectly, writes Eduardo Porter in the New York Times (paywall), but neither will the strategy of aggressive tariffs while backing away from the WTO and the TPP. Instead, America needs to get even deeper into the global game.
Yes, nonstop is the only way to fly. This week’s very first direct Quantas flight from Australia to the UK was a 17-hour journey that delivered on one of the earliest promises of air travel, John Gapper observes in the Financial Times (paywall): getting the ride over as soon as possible. Airlines may prefer pushing customers through hub airports. No passenger ever has.
Look at trees to soften your eyes. Reading off of flat screens, handheld and desktop, for hours on end, has narrowed our field of vision. The natural antidote can be found in the three-dimensional perspective we naturally crave, Virginia Heffernan writes in Wired, for “trees are very unlike screens. They’re a prodigious interface.”
Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, antique concealed spy gear, and duty-free chickens to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day, or download our apps for iPhone and Android. Today’s Weekend Brief was edited by John Mancini.