I, like many around the country, have been in sheer shock and confusion about the results of the election and pretty depressed about the various things happening around the country in its aftermath. It is pretty scary that things can change so drastically, bringing some of the hidden ugliness out of the woodwork just in matter of a few days. But, this is not what I want to write about!

Whenever new technologies come out, no matter how carefully thought out, they have unanticipated and unintended consequences. There is a long list of these. 

One of the most recent ones is the internet. Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was transitioned to NSFNet for the benefit of academic research and connectivity to supercomputer centers. I distinctly remember the year 1986 when Prof. David Beveridge, with whom I had worked for my PhD and postdoc, moved to Wesleyan University and asked me to take up a job there to support his research. Our group was an early recipient of NSFNet to connect to the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center for computational chemistry research. We purchased one of the first network hardware from Cisco to connect several of our computers to the campus network and then to the internet.

In 1990 the government decided to test the waters by opening it up to private companies and initial interest in this was limited because no one had a killer app. The adoption of Tim Berners-Lee‘s World Wide Web ideas to produce a browser like Mosaic by Marc Andreessen changed everything. The rest is history. No one ever anticipated in 1990’s that this technology would take us to where we are today. The disruptions and unanticipated consequences have been enormous – most around the world depend on the internet, several industries have been made obsolete, we use it for teaching, learning and research in ways that were initially shunned as unwanted disruptions to true and tested practices of hundreds of years.

However, there have also been many unwanted consequences. Pornography, illegal activities of all sorts and most notably the use of this by the terrorists.

The same with Emails. The versions of emails developed for the internet were modeled after the true and tested snail mail. There were “post offices” to which you sent your email. These post offices had necessary intelligence to route the mail to the next hop and so on and so forth and finally as a user, you periodically checked your mailbox to see if there were any emails for you and you “picked them up”. The original design did not account for the fact that whereas it is next to impossible to trace the validity of the “from address” in snail mail, electronically this was hard, but possible and absolutely necessary. “from addresses” were easy to forge electronically and this resulted in some really ugly unintended consequences. Now, we have a reasonable tweaks to reduce such forging, such as requiring validation of the from address by the “local post office” and the requirement that you need to have an account with the local post office to be able to email.

Before this gets way too long, I want to get to the point. As I have mentioned earlier, the rush to get the technology out results in not so carefully thought out technologies, both hardware and software. Unfortunately, this results in some of the worst untended uses that then become next to impossible to revert. So, is there a way to require responsible behavior on the part of tech giants?

There is already such a process for food and drugs which has a fair number of checks and balances before a drug is made available widely. FDA wants to make sure that as many tests as possible is done beforehand, though there have been many cases where they have not been able to cover all their bases. And also, if I am the one who is waiting for a drug that will cure my ailment, I will be upset by the length of time they take!

Should the technology companies be regulated for responsibilities similar to an FDA model or should FDA adopt more of the technology model? Did I mention “regulation”? Oh my God, now I am back to where I started. This is after all a hot political issue and I am now depressed again. Good Bye.