Here is a copy of my presentation from a private engineering conference, where I was invited to speak about ML/AI security. It contains the history of police, street lights, and many more relevant past events that should inform our immediate future of machine engineering:

Abstract:

As the old saying goes from the digital prairie, if you see yourself as someone of influence just try ordering someone else’s robot around.

Given the automated platforms everyone has running right now, who is really able to account for what their learning machines are doing, let alone why and how they were authorized? And even if an accounting can be done for one or some robots, who is reliably able solve such questions at scale for increasingly ephemeral operations (assuming robots continue to allow us to terminate them)?

This presentation puts forward protocols and procedures for the idea that a foundation of ethics underpins the standards that will be used to create security solutions that both make intelligent machines more secure from us, as well as make ourselves more secure from them.

Copy of Presentation Slides: security-intell-machines.daviottenheimer.pdf (7 MB)

Twenty years after the American Embassy in Nairobi was bombed, a Memorial Park now sits at the junctions of Avenues named after Moi (2nd President of Kenya) and Haile Selassie (Emperor of Ethiopia).

A memorial wall commemorates names of the more than 200 who lost their lives, along-side a garden, a fountain, and a USAID-financed sculpture made from the debris of the blast. The visitor’s center says at least 12K people visit every month to recount the morning of August 7th in 1998 as well as “be educated about the futility of violence and the essence of peace”.

Local news reports how even today Kenyans and Tanzanians continue to discuss reparations from the US government, and whether there were obvious security failures at the Embassy.

Arguments in support of compensation to Kenyan victims are based partly on claims that the US State Department failed to properly secure the embassy building that stood on Moi Avenue in Nairobi.

Prudence Bushnell, US ambassador to Kenya at the time of the bombing, has said she repeatedly alerted officials in Washington that the embassy was vulnerable to terrorist attack. No action was taken in response to her warnings.

“As ambassador, I was responsible for security,” Ms Bushnell wrote in her contribution to a set of 20th anniversary reflections on the attack published in the Foreign Service Journal. “And while I had pushed and pushed to get Washington’s attention to our vulnerabilities, I remain keenly aware that I failed.”

This was the event that fueled Sheehan’s plan to fight al Qaeda with diplomatic pressure, which also was said to have “landed with a resounding thud” within US the government.

Sheehan secretly set forth specific actions the US must take toward Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, with Pakistan being the pivotal member to isolate the terrorist group. His plan wasn’t enacted. In retrospect now we look at what should have been done before 2000 when the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, and before 2001 when the Twin Towers were bombed.

The premise of the Stanford graduate’s ruling, where he gave a Stanford student light sentence, was that the accused should be allowed a few more bad decisions before being reigned in:

…recalling a judge primarily based on one decision — that, for me, is a step too far.

Ooops, I’m sorry, that is actually the judge explaining why he should be allowed another chance after his own poor judgment. I suppose he also might have considered claiming that he was intoxicated on the bench as that seems also to be some sort of get-out-sentencing card to him:

Prosecutors had asked for a six-year prison sentence. But Persky sided with a recommendation from the county probation department, which said “when compared to other crimes of similar nature” the Turner case “may be considered less serious due to (his) level of intoxication.”

Is it just me or does this sound like someone is arguing that drinks are the cause of violent crimes, as if straight out of a prohibition pamphlet?

The judge’s reasoning seems seriously lacking, self-servingly biased if not just insensitive, and none of this has yet to rehabilitate Stanford’s image. The word in Silicon Valley continues to be that the school seems ethically challenged by design:

There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. […] The school now looks like a giant tech incubator with a football team.

So the real headline is a Stanford man is dumped by voters, which may be a symptom of spreading consciousness about Silicon Valley political conservatism that ties back to the sadly racist and corrupt legacy of the school’s founder. Read carefully the 1862 Inaugural Address of Stanford after he bribed his way into office:

To my mind it is clear, that the settlement among us of an inferior race is to be discouraged, by every legitimate means. Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population. Large numbers of this class are already here; and, unless we do something early to check their immigration, the question, which of the two tides of immigration, meeting upon the shores of the Pacific, shall be turned back, will be forced upon our consideration, when far more difficult than now of disposal. There can be no doubt but that the presence of numbers among us of a degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race, and, to a certain extent, repel desirable immigration. It will afford me great pleasure to concur with the Legislature in any constitutional action, having for its object the repression of the immigration of the Asiatic races.