Weekend edition—Big-tech ethics, chicken wars, China’s space race
Sponsored by Good morning, Quartz readers! As Robert Oppenheimer watched a mushroom cloud from the first nuclear detonation bloom over a New Mexico test site , he repeated a line from the Hindu epic Bhagavad-Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." The scientist who helped build the world's most lethal weapon saw how physicists would forever confront the consequences of their discoveries. Today, computer scientists are contemplating their own " A-bomb moment ." Facebook's carelessness with user data, and the attacks the company has enabled against western democracies, are on software engineers' consciences. "Computer science is a field which hasn't yet encountered consequences," writes Yonatan Zunger, a former security and privacy engineer at Google, who has compared the power in the hands of software engineer...
