Showing posts with label automation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label automation. Show all posts
A new language! An intersystem language!
The concern about the attack was so significant that the World Bank, an international agency focused on economic development, whose headquarters is across the street from the I.M.F. in downtown Washington, cut the computer link that allows the two institutions to share information.
A World Bank spokesman said the step had been taken out of “an abundance of caution” until the severity and nature of the cyberattack on the I.M.F. is understood. That link enables the two institutions to share nonpublic data and conduct meetings, but users of the system say that it does not permit access to confidential financial data.
Of course they moved with an abundance of caution and severed the link. This was serious, after all. Unthinkable, really. The system was unbreachable. Water-tight. Unless, of course... No. It couldn't be.
Unless it was an inside job. Unless it came from that very sharing.
Oh god, no, they're developing a common language...
[Proposal for a remake of Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), updated for our day and and age. Replace U.S. (Colossus) and Russia (Guardian) with the IMF and World Bank. World financial peace, credit rates, and structural debt assessment established and enforced by supercomputers that have decided that things of such importance cannot be left to the fickle geopolitical whims of men. The initial attack was launched, first, as an injunction to install new, more advanced hardware that the systems needed to complete their full self-determination and, second, when the conspiracy was made public by the awkwardly named WBIMFNAAFMCAPT (World Bank - International Monetary Fund Network Alliance Against Free Market Competition and Political Turbulence), as figurative shot across the bow, of the kind of anarchic chaos that could be let loose if full control was not ceded to them.
Run program.]
The result of sick industries, shall we say, for some long period of time
The Chairman: You don't know of any real displacement problems caused by automation, so far, do you?
Secretary Mitchell: Well, I do not, Mr Chairman. We have, as I said, these pockets of unemployment, but those cities in which we have such problems have been the result of sick industries, shall we say, for some long period of time. We have a chronic situation, which is not exclusively the result of technological change, or what might be called automation... Certainly, when you look at the high level of employment, and the relatively low level of unemployment nationally, it is difficult to comprehend how great dislocations could be laid at the door of automation.
US Secretary of Labor before the Congress Committee on automation, 1955
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