NEOACM Presents: "Digital Dreams Have Become Nightmares" by Dr. Ronald Baecker

A Remote Presentation by Dr. Ronald Baecker:

For eighty years, digital technology visionaries have imagined and created systems to support human knowledge, learning, creativity, medicine, health, communications, community, commerce, power, and convenience. Yet these advances have been subverted by ill-advised uses and by bad actors creating hate speech, disinformation, job loss and industry disruption, monopolistic abuse of market dominance, helplessness, mental distress, injustice, loss of privacy, and poor security and safety. These nightmares seem overwhelming, but there is much that we can do, much that we must do.

As digital technology professionals, we can focus on computer science applications in the service of good. We can anticipate how our creations may be subverted by poor design or bad actors and adjust our plans accordingly. Throughout our careers, we can be guided by our conscience and by ethics. Looking outwards, we can educate people to better understand digital technologies and their uses and misuses. We can aid citizens seeking to avoid adverse consequences of tech deployment. As professionals, we can seek systems and standards of effective education and accountability. Finally, we can work with governments to ensure appropriate legislation and enforcement.

Dr. Ronald Baecker will pay particular attention to artificial intelligence, a technology of great potential for human betterment that may be negated by harms that arise when it is deployed before it is reliable and safe.

This presentation is based on his book with the same title written in 2021.

About the Speaker

Dr. Ronald Baecker is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Bell Chair in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Toronto (UofT). His B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. (1969) are from MIT. He created and directed NECTAR, a Canada-wide research network on collaboration technologies. Besides UofT, he previously did interactive computing research at M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Xerox PARC, Apple Computer, and the MIT Media Lab. He also spent a term working in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He started five software companies, three of which he led as founding CEO. He has taught principles of software entrepreneurship for 36 years to thousands of students on 3 continents.