“Here’s where we are, this critical juncture in history. We’ve never lived through this. We’ve had an agrarian revolution. We’ve had an industrial revolution. This is akin to that. The societal transformations afoot right now are that revolutionary. And what we’re seeing is this bifurcation. What is technology being used for? Not what we were promised. Where’s my jetpack? Right? Where’s my hover board or my self-tying shoes? Where is the increased betterment to my quality of life? That’s the potential for technology, but not what it’s actually doing.”
— Sascha Meinrath, Palmer Chair in Telecommunications Studies in the College of Communications at Penn State, spoke about “Vanguard Technologies and the ‘Internet of Things’: Newfound Liberation or Digital Feudalism?” Wednesday (Oct. 12) at the Penn State Forum Speaker Series at the Penn Stater Hotel and Conference Center.
“The world that we want to leave our kids is being defined right now. For me, as a parent, the world that I want to leave behind is one where liberation, not lock-in, is her reality.”
“Think of technology as an ecosystem. What is the No. 1 vector that hackers use when they’re hacking on anything? And the answer is Microsoft Windows. You learn about this in biology. If you don’t have a robust ecosystem, it’s fragile. Our elections systems are a hodgepodge, a heterogeneity of really bad, often non-interoperable systems, that are very difficult to hack because you don’t hack one thing, you would have to hack hundreds of different systems simultaneously. If, as is being proposed, we replaced this heterogeneity of devices with a singular, say Diebold System, it becomes way easier to hack.”
Meinrath is director of X-Lab, an innovative think tank focusing on the intersection of vanguard technologies and public policy. He is a renowned technology policy expert and is internationally recognized for his work over the past two decades as a community internet pioneer, social entrepreneur and angel investor.
The Penn State Forum Speaker Series is open to the public. Tickets are $21 and include a buffet lunch. Tickets may be purchased through the Penn State id+ Office, 20 HUB-Robeson Center. For questions, call 814-865-7590 or email idcard@psu.edu. For more information and a complete list of speakers, visit http://sites.psu.edu/forum/.