Thought Diversity Necessary for Formation of the Internet

Most of us in the computer field know that having a diverse workplace is important for making decisions on what products to develop and how to market them. But is diversity important for solving computer science and engineering problems? I say YES. Diversity helped form the modern networking field. Without diversity we would not have the Internet. 

The following parable is from a US point of view. Lots of work was done in Europe too, but that is for another post when I have more time. :-) 

In the early days of networking, most of the data communications experts were on the East Coast. So we had the mainframe which polled the slave terminals. We had RS-232 where terminals had to Request to Send (RTS) and get a Clear to Send (CTS) to communicate. 

We had error correction, network control, and time division multiplexing, where nodes waited their turn to talk. The algorithms were orderly, hierarchical, predictable, and unwieldy. 

With the culture changes of the 1970s and 1980s, ideas for algorithms were infused with more creativity, and Token Ring was invented. A ring sounds like something from The Hobbit, with liberal connotations, where all the nodes in a circle sing Kumbaya and use a token to determine who gets to speak. However, the algorithms were still mechanistic and militaristic. A network node seized the token in order to talk, and when the node was talking, every other node was required to be silent. An active and standby monitor were needed to oversee the operations. In bridged networks, nodes used source routing to dictate which path the data frames should take. 

The engineering was still being developed by the New Yorkers in suits and white shirts with pocket protectors. Token Ring was expensive and hard to troubleshoot, and it mimicked human communications found in hierarchical, autocratic, traditional societies.

Out on the West Coast and in Hawaii, on the other hand, we had the surfers and the hippies working on networking! In the 1970s, Bob Metcalfe flew to Hawaii and all hell broke loose. :-) 

Metcalfe's research on ALOHAnet, a wireless packet network that was developed by the University of Hawaii, led to the development of CSMA and Ethernet. With CSMA, nodes listen before they send, but if they don’t hear anything, they just send anyway. If multiple nodes sense that there’s quiet, they just go ahead and send, so there could be multiple nodes all talking at once. The nodes also listen while sending, and back off if necessary. It’s like a big party! Aloha! 

Ethernet was inexpensive, easy to set up, easy to troubleshoot (at least compared to Token Ring), and scalable. We still use it today with speeds up to 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps. The work of Radia Perlman on the Spanning Tree Protocol allowed robust bridged networks to dynamically form a spanning tree. Routing across Ethernet networks became possible with the invention of the Internet.

The Internet was developed by men and women, working on the West and East coast, and parts in-between. In the West, UCLA, UCSB, Stanford Research Institute, and the University of Utah first worked on ARPANET and then the Internet. On the East Coast, universities, the US federal government, and various companies helped develop protocols and algorithms. The developers decided to break up data into packets and to forgo traditional point-to-point telecomm links and circuits that needed to be set up in advance. This led to the NSFNET and then to the commercial Internet.

The Internet’s infrastructure was designed by engineers seeped in human communications styles very different from the hierarchical, autocratic, traditional styles mentioned earlier. 

If the development of network algorithms had been left only to the stuffy East Coasters with their crew cuts and slide rules, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today, on a public, gigantic Internet that is built on top of Ethernet and wireless technologies. 

Kitty Joyner, electrical engineer, at Langley in 1952.

It was the diversity of thinking that made modern networks possible. This isn't just some politically-correct maxim that applies only to product design and marketing. Diversity helped solve the engineering and computer science problems that made the Internet possible.

Top Ten Reasons Not to Publish Top Ten Women Lists

Sophie Germain by Auguste Eugene Leray

I'm guilty of making my own list of women who do great work in tech, but nonetheless there are at least 10 reasons we should stop publishing these "Top X Number of Women in Some STEM or Leadership Role" articles. And that is 10 decimal, not binary. :-)

1. These lists are really getting old. Get creative. Stop copying everyone else.
2. Lists of women in tech call attention to the shortage of women, and can be discouraging. 
3. If we must make lists, let's make lists about top reasons to be a computer professional. Be encouraging! 
4. An in-depth article about an ordinary woman and her work is more inspirational than a list of sound-bites about "top women."
5. Lists are often not well-researched. A CEO with no engineering experience doesn't belong on a list of women engineers, for example. 
6. Sometimes a woman in a "top 10 women" list was actually a man previously.
7. It's 2015. Maybe it's time to talk about top performers in tech, regardless of gender.
8. The actual work is being done by the thousands of women and men you left off your list. 
9. Too often the list includes Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, or Hedy Lamarr, whom we all love, but there are lots of living women in computing too. 
10. When the tech workforce becomes more gender diverse, what are you going to do then? Top Sophie Germain prime number of women in tech? :-) 

p.s. To see my list of women in tech, go here. 

A Mini-Review of Ex Machina from a Feminist Point of View

One of my main takeaways from the Ex Machina movie was that if men design robots, the robots will be beautiful young females who are so dumb they wear 7-inch stiletto heels in the woods! Despite this idiocy, the robots will be cunning and able to use their female wiles to seduce human men and make the men act dumb.

Seriously, if we don't get more women in tech, the robots that could replace humans some day will be a male fantasy of everything immature men love and hate about women. This is a scary thought.

Spoiler alert: The naked female robots in the closets are creepy and unsettling.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk recently tweeted: “Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.” 

If the movie Ex Machina is a good prediction of the future, then we are in fact the evolutionary ancestors of the digital robots that we will create and that will one day take over the world. 

As Nathan, the brilliant Google-like engineer who created the Artificial Intelligence in the movie, says, "One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction."

I can't think of a better reason for why we need more women in tech! If we are truly creating our descendants, then we need the creators of these descendants to be a diverse group with varied decision-making styles and a maturity that comes from overcoming challenges. Without help from people not like them, the young white and Asian men who make up 80-90% of tech today simply won't make all the right decisions about what our digital descendants should be capable of doing. 

Even if we're just creating robots that will do chores for us, or intelligent agents that can perceive their environment and act in some rational way to benefit us humans, the robots will be more functional, less buggy, and more benevolent if they are designed by a diverse group. 

I actually did love the movie for its thought-provoking elucidation of the philosophical underpinnings of artificial intelligence research, but I found the overuse of gender norms disheartening. What if the programmer selected to run the Turing test had been female? What if some of the robots were handsome young males? Or even old, chubby males or females? 

What if some of the robots were androgynous? I think that would have made a better movie. And in the real world, I think a diverse group of technology creators will make a better future, both for humans and robots.