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I am very excited to be here today to address you all with my talk, "The World Set Free." This is actually my second time in Melbourne. I spoke at RubyConf Australia in 2015. I hope some of you remember that year.
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That was before many of you were actually born! It was also my first time speaking at an International Conference. I'm super happy to be back here. I gave a talk called "Pre-factoring: Getting it Closer to Right." I made a joke about drop bears then, and I apologize; it took the organizers eight years to forgive me and invite me back. But anyway, here we are!
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Like I said, my talk is called "The World Set Free," and I'm very excited about this talk. This is a brand new talk; this is the second time I've given it.
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I was actually invited to speak at Los Alamos National Lab in the U.S., in New Mexico, which we're going to talk about a little bit. This is the home of the Manhattan Project, which, of course, developed the atomic bomb as part of World War II.
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When they invited me, I thought, "They want me to give a talk about ethics at the place where the atomic bomb was developed?" I honestly went back and forth on it quite a bit, and I finally landed on the idea that maybe these are the people who need to consider this perspective.
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So, I wrote the talk for them and I've adapted it today for this audience. I'm super excited to share it with you. You all got my bio, and I'm happy with that.
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I do want to mention that my partner works in academia as a professor. When they do research or writing, they create something called a positionality statement. This establishes the author's identity in society as it relates to a particular topic, so I thought I would also give my positionality statement here so you can understand where I'm coming from.
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As our wonderful hosts mentioned, I have worked for over a decade to promote the ideals of equity and justice in technology. I have experienced firsthand that the status quo has a very strong immune system and punishes people who dare to challenge it. Because of the audacity of my work, coupled with my identity as a queer and trans person, I have been a victim of streams of online and offline harassment, including being targeted by right-wing news media, being repeatedly doxxed, and receiving incredible and terrifying death threats. My intention in being here today and giving this talk is to employ a historical and literary lens to explore the question of whether we, as technologists, have an ethical responsibility for the technologies that we bring into the world.
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So today, I'm going to tell you about the future, and the future starts in 1913. In that year, the value of world trade reached roughly 38 billion dollars, which is remarkably close to the 40 billion dollars that many people have been talking about recently.
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In 1913, the Marconi Company initiated duplex transatlantic wireless communication, allowing sending and receiving at the same time, like telephones do. For the first time, Charles Fabry and Henri Buisson discovered the ozone layer, which we would later declare war on in the 1980s and 1990s. American zoologist and wildlife conservationist William Temple Hornaday published "Our Vanishing Wildlife," which was the first full catalog of species in danger of extinction—a war we also declared later.
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Emily Burrell stated the infinite monkey theorem, which claims that if you had infinite monkeys working at an infinite number of typewriters, they would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare—sometimes referred to as ChatGPT! Igor Sikorsky flew the world's first four-engine fixed-wing aircraft. Meanwhile, Ford Motor Company, in Highland Park near Detroit, became the first automobile production facility in the world to implement the moving assembly line.
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On October 31st, the Lincoln Highway, which is the first automobile road across the United States, was dedicated. In Buenos Aires, the Buenos Aires underground, the first subway in South America, opened. The first known ascent of Mount Olympus in Greece, at least by mortals, was achieved by Swiss mountaineers.
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Oscar Barnac produced the first 35-millimeter still camera. This is a little controversial, but Harry Brearley invented stainless steel in Sheffield, England. There was also an American who claimed the same thing. Of course, the Woolworth Building opened in New York City, designed by Cass Gilbert, and it was the tallest building in the world until 1930.
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More related to our subject, Niels Bohr presented his quantum model of the atom. Interestingly, I discovered during my research that the previous model of the atom was called the Plum Pudding Theory, which suggested that electrons were negative little plums in a pudding.
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Most importantly to our topic today, H.G. Wells published a future history in serialized form called a prophetic trilogy, consisting of three books: "A Trap to Catch the Sun," "The Last War in the World," and "The World Set Free." From the book, "The thing they sought all unwittingly was the snare that will someday catch the Sun." Wells was a prolific writer, social critic, futurist, socialist, pacifist, and perhaps one of the first techno-optimists.
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Techno-optimism is the belief that technology can produce more good than bad if we acknowledge the problems in technology while holding an optimism in human virtue. H.G. Wells believed that it was possible, through what he called inductive history, to chart the possibilities of the future and encourage people to make sensible uses of those possibilities.
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Science fiction writer and critic Auguste Bergerie said that Wells remains the outstanding expositor of both the hope and despair embodied in technology, which represent the major facts of life in our world. Philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell remarked that Wells's importance was primarily as a liberator of thought and imagination. He constructed pictures of possible societies, both attractive and unattractive, that encouraged the young to envision possibilities they otherwise would not have considered.
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Wells was excited about the potential of technology, but he also feared its dark side. He foresaw the possibility of unprecedented total war in the early 20th century. In his fiction, Wells's rule was that only one fantastic assumption was allowed per story, translated into commonplace terms and essentially domesticated. He asked, "How would you feel if X were true? What might or might not happen to you as a result?" This approach incorporated humanity into the vision of a technological future.
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A frequent theme in Wells's work is the mastery of power in energy through technological advance. His conception of power was broad, not just referring to factories and automation, but encompassing human industry and its psychological and political effects. In his 1913 book, "The World Set Free," he predicted that humanity would develop destructive nuclear weapons and perpetuate devastating global wars.
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This was the first time in literature that the idea of an atomic bomb was described. In 1913, scientists were already aware of radioactive decay, and while the energy released by substances like radium is negligible, the total amount released is massive. Wells used this as the basis for his story; his atomic bombs had no more force than ordinary high explosives, a somewhat primitive idea. These bombs would be deployed by a bomb thrower who would literally bite off a small stud and toss it, consisting of lumps of pure carolinium that induced a blazing, continuous explosion.
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He imagined a 17-day long explosion that would sit in place and exude very damaging and destructive rays. He wrote, "Never before in the history of warfare had there been such a weapon. These atomic bombs that science burst upon the world that night were strange, even to those who made them. The inevitable result of the modern state, the introduction of atomic energy in a divided world, resulted in a collapse of society."
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The only possibilities remaining were either a relapse of mankind to barbarism or the acceptance of science as the basis of a new social order. Wells presented world government as a solution to the threat of nuclear weapons. He envisioned that humanity would finally bring about a near utopia, writing, "For the first time, they had to see the round globe as one problem. It was impossible to deal with it piece by piece. They had to secure it universally from any fresh outbreak of atomic destruction and ensure a permanent and universal peace."
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This vision from 1913 was dedicated to a scientist named Frederick Soddy, who received a Nobel Prize in 1921 for his work in radioactive isotopes. What's truly interesting about Wells's story is that it directly influenced the development of nuclear weapons.
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From the book, he wrote, "The power to destroy was continually increasing; there was no increase whatever in the ability to escape it." The next character in our story is physicist Leo Szilard, a socialist, humanist, and member of a group of prominent Hungarian scientists and mathematicians of Jewish descent who fled Europe for obvious reasons in the early 1900s.
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Szilard wrote a PhD thesis on Maxwell's demon, a thought experiment that hypothetically violates the second law of thermodynamics and ties to the nascent field of information theory. In 1960, he warned that a sufficiently large bomb made with specific but common materials could annihilate mankind. As a result, the Atomic Energy Commission disagreed, and Time magazine called him Chicken Little. Szilard read Wells's "The World Set Free" in 1932, the same year that the neutron was discovered. A year later, Szilard conceived the notion of a neutron chain reaction and filed for patents on it.
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He assigned his patent to the British War Office to keep the news from reaching the wider scientific community, writing, "Knowing what this would mean—and I knew it because I had read H.G. Wells—I did not want this technology to become public." In 1939, Szilard and Albert Einstein sent a letter to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, warning that Germany might be developing atomic bombs and suggesting that the U.S. and the United Kingdom should start their own nuclear program.
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The letter prompted action by Roosevelt and eventually led to the Manhattan Project. From 1942 to 1946, the project was led by the United States with support from the United Kingdom and Canada. It is said that, in retrospect, probably no more than about a dozen people in the entire world knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project; perhaps only a few thousand were even aware that work on atoms was involved.
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In fact, more than 100,000 others employed in the project worked like moles in the dark, not knowing exactly what they were contributing to. There's a notion of modularity that we have today; modularity means insulating oneself from the impact of one's actions. Szilard was one of the few who did know what the project was about.
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He was somewhat hard to control; he was very dismissive of security rules and constantly asked difficult ethical questions about what was happening. He insisted on open debate among the scientists working on it, which almost led General Groves, who was head of the Manhattan Project, to incarcerate him for the duration of the war. However, Szilard was too valuable, so of course, the work continued.
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In July 1945, the Trinity Test demonstrated the success of the project with the world's first detonation of a nuclear weapon. Shortly thereafter, 70 scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project signed petition urging U.S. President Truman to demonstrate the capabilities of the bomb and use its threat to force Japan to surrender.
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This was a moral plea; it warned that if the United States actually used the bomb, they would bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale. They stated that by using the bomb, the United States would lose its moral authority. The petition read in part, "The added material strength that this lead gives to the United States brings with it a very important term: the obligation of restraint. If we were to violate this obligation, our moral position would be weakened in the eyes of the world."
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In reaction to the petition, General Groves launched an investigation to seek evidence of sedition and unlawful behavior from select parts. The petition never made it to the desk of President Truman, and the bombs were used on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a month later on August 6th and 9th, 1945. The petition itself wasn't declassified or made public until 1961.
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In 1946, many of the Manhattan Project scientists began circulating a mimeograph newsletter called the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists." In June 1947, the newsletter was poised to become a magazine, its cover featuring what is arguably the most powerful piece of information design in the 20th century, created by a Chicago-based artist named Myrtle Langsdorf.
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Langsdorf had volunteered to create the cover, and her husband, Alexander Langsdorf, worked on the Manhattan Project with the magazine's co-editor. There wasn't much room for an illustration, and they had a very small budget that only permitted the use of two colors. She found a solution by conceiving the Doomsday Clock in 1947. The Great Escape from Humanity stemmed from nuclear weapons, particularly the prospect that the U.S. and the Soviet Union were headed for a nuclear arms race.
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The scientists involved hoped to frighten the world into rationality—sounds similar to Wells, right? At first, Langsdorf considered using the symbol of uranium for the magazine's cover, but as she listened to the scientists who had worked on the bomb passionately debating the consequences of the new technology, she felt an urgency that drew her to the idea of time and a clock.
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She sketched a clock to suggest that we didn't have much time left to get this technology under control, and she actually sketched it on the back cover of a bound copy of Beethoven's piano sonatas. Wells had an idea regarding the necessity of a world government in a post-atomic war age, and while his utopian ideal never came to full fruition, some aspects certainly did.
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International agencies sprung up after World War II in hopes that some kind of framework would prevent another world war. We saw Bretton Woods, the IMF, NATO, the European Union, and the United Nations—all steps toward a more peaceful and organized society that Wells had envisioned. Following World War II, Wells started a campaign for universal human rights, championing an effort that eventually led to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
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We will hear more about this later. Quoting from "The World Set Free," Wells remarked, "The century before was just a hundred years crescendo of waste. Only the extreme individualism of that period, and its utter lack of any collective understanding or purpose, can explain that waste." In 1938, Wells published a book called "World Brain," a collection of essays describing his vision of a free, synthetic, authoritative, and permanent world encyclopedia that would provide universal access to information by everyone around the world.
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He stated, "Time is close at hand when any student in any part of the world will be able to sit with a projector in their own study at their own convenience to examine any book, any document in an exact replica." This conception of a world brain influenced an individual named Edwin Berkeley. Berkeley's first job was working as an actuary at Prudential, and he was fired for repeatedly protesting against nuclear weapons.
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He invented a toy computer that could solve Boolean equations, play music, and attempted to predict gender. This toy was called Geniac; it was an educational invention created in 1955. One of the kit projects was a primitive masculine-feminine testing machine, where the user was asked to answer questions about gender, such as whether an electric train or a doll with a complete wardrobe would make a better toy for a child.
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Berkeley published the first computer magazine and coined the term "computer art." In 1949, he published "Giant Brains: or Machines that Think," the first popular book on electronic computers, which included plans for a personal computer that could be assembled for about six hundred dollars.
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Berkeley began working on computers with the Navy during World War II, side by side with Admiral Grace Hopper. An important part of his biography is that he co-founded the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947, which champions the open exchange of information and promotes the highest professional and ethical standards.
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Berkeley also joined a group called the Committee for the Social Responsibility of Computer People, which published a historic foundational report in 1958 outlining the ethical obligations of technologists. This report stated that given the power and potential of computers, ethical considerations were paramount. It concluded that the scientist's credo, 'knowledge for knowledge's sake,' easily conflicts with ethical responsibilities.
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Fast forward to 1972, during the height of the Vietnam War: Berkeley and his colleague Franz Alt were invited to speak at the 25th anniversary celebration of the Association for Computing Machinery. Franz's topic was reflections, while Berkeley's topic was more forward-looking horizons. Berkeley took a different tone, telling the audience that anyone working to further unethical uses of computers—including their application in developing weapons technology—should quit their jobs.
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He called out members of the audience by name, leading many of his colleagues to stand up and walk out during his speech, including Admiral Grace Hopper. Berkeley concluded by asserting that it was a gross neglect of responsibility when computer scientists did not consider their impacts in terms of societal benefit or harm.
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Lila Green, one of my favorite researchers, studies the effects of the digital age on society, its structure, and policy creation. She authored the book "Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex" and has documented ethical responses to conflicts between online and offline communities. Green famously conducted ethnographies of virtual worlds, online medical forums, and BDSM communities.
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Her work emphasizes that technology must always be examined in a social context. She argues that technological advancement is often shaped by the choices and priorities of powerful entities, whom she refers to as the ABCs: armed forces, bureaucracies, and corporations. Their distorted priorities frequently conflict with technology's potential as a force for good.
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We've seen that governments and corporations operate in their own best interests. This raises the question of where ethical responsibility for technology falls. I believe responsibility proceeds from those with the greatest agency to the least. If our corporations, governments, and armed forces won't accept their moral and ethical responsibilities, it falls to us to interrupt, subvert, reimagine, and replace. We can choose not to research, not to write, and not to build.
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My particular area of expertise is open source technology, which is amazing. Open source is responsible for most of us being in this room today and plays a critical role in mass surveillance, anti-immigrant violence, protest suppression, and the development of cruel and inhumane weapons. In 2019, an activist group called Mahinte launched the No Tech for ICE campaign to draw attention to tech companies benefiting from human rights violations.
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One developer, Seth Vargo, realized that the company he worked for, Chef, had a million-dollar contract with ICE. He had developed open source code to enhance Chef's utility but believed he had an ethical responsibility for how that code was used.
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Vargo removed the code from RubyGems and GitHub, causing deployments around the world to fail. Within two hours, his code had been restored against his will, which I viewed as an epic ethical failure in our field.
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Two weeks later, I wrote the Hippocratic License, which caused quite a stir in the community, even leading to Eric Raymond being kicked out of his own organization. What the Hippocratic License addressed was the concern that, under existing open source licensing, developers have no agency over how their work is used.
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Over the past few years, we've progressed to Hippocratic License version 3, which derives its ethical standards from the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, as well as various international covenants regarding social, political, and environmental rights. This new version is also modular, allowing components to explicitly address human rights concerns, such as environmental justice and labor rights.
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This attention and debate that version 1 caused led to the founding of the Organization for Ethical Source in 2021, with a mission to help open source communities ensure their work promotes social good and human rights. Beyond licensing, we develop tools and standards to achieve fair and equitable outcomes for all contributors and stakeholders.
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I’m inspired to see a resurgence of interest in techno-optimism from young people. This is Jasmine Sun, creator of Reboot and publisher of Kernel magazine, which I highly recommend. In the first issue of Kernel magazine, she wrote the article "Take Back the Future: The Progressive Case for Techno-Optimism."
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In it, she states that extreme techno-pessimism absolves technologies of the obligation to use their skills for good and frees them from the responsibility to empower people. Quoting sci-fi author Ted Chiang, she notes that most of our fears or anxieties about technology can often be understood as fears about how capitalism uses the technology against us.
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The challenge is to disentangle technology from capitalism. Current decision processes suggest that new technology is introduced first by a small elite or a homogeneous group, while social issues are punted to policymakers, who inevitably lag behind by decades. As a result, once the armed forces and corporations have locked in their technological dominance, they solidify their harms.
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Jasmine concludes by saying that as technologists, the labor market has granted us disproportionate leverage, and this privilege is a duty. We must situate ourselves within a broader system of power and consider how our actions can either help or harm others. We cannot use code to abstract ourselves from consequences.
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So how do we fulfill the duty that Jasmine insists accompanies our privilege? How do we exercise what Leo Szilard called our obligation of restraint? How do we accept, as Berkeley wrote, our heavier than average share of responsibility?
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How do we resist the distorted priorities of the powerful, and how do we meet H.G. Wells's challenge to center humanity in our technological future? For starters, we need to acknowledge that we're not just building hammers.
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We need to accept that technology is not neutral and never has been, and act accordingly. As Octavia Butler put it, 'Intelligence allows you to deny facts you don't like, but your denial doesn't really matter.' The belief that technology is fundamentally neutral is comforting.
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It serves as an ethical firewall, insulating us from the real-world impacts of what we build. So why would we want to build technology that's neutral? Instead, why not actively create technology designed for good?
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Quoting once more from H.G. Wells, in his vision of a post-peace world, one of the engineers of this near utopia noted, "The bulk of activity in the world no longer lies with necessities; the majority of the population now consists of artists and poets." In "The World Set Free," Wells describes a future where energy is endless, where industry is no longer central to human society, where abundance sets us all free, allowing us to all be artists and poets.
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That is the future that I am asking you to imagine. That is the future that I am asking you to build toward. That is the future that, today, I dare to predict. Thank you.
