CS61B
Lecture 12:
Programming in the Real World
Tesla Assembly Line (short clip)
Facebook Monthly Active Users
Over 2.7 billion monthly active users.
(Of STEM jobs)
Current Economic Upheaval
From an April 2015 McKinsey Global Institute report: Four trends are leading to a dramatic upheaval in society:
“Compared with the Industrial Revolution, we estimate that this change is happening ten times faster and at 300 times the scale.” [Link]
And at the Middle… You
Even if you are not a CS major, I believe this course is a major step on transforming you into someone who will be driving this change.
MIT Technology Review’s “Biggest Tech Failures of 2016-2019”
EOS Tokens: By December it had raised $700 million by selling... EOS tokens, to investors in what’s called an initial coin offering. An ICO is [an] alternative to a stock market debut... Often, the promise is that buyers of the virtual coins can redeem them for a company’s product. But EOS tokens give the buyer the right to nothing specific. The coins, the company says, have no “uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities, or features.”
Volkswagen’s “defeat device”: Volkswagen created what may be the most expensive few lines of code ever written. The software, called a “defeat device” and cooked up by the German automaker to fool U.S. emissions testers, concealed that its diesel cars emit as much as 40 times the allowed pollution [cost to VW: $14,700,000,000].
MIT Technology Review’s “Biggest Tech Failures of 2016-2019”
737 Max: “First one brand-new 737 Max Boeing plane, Lion Air Flight 510, crashed shortly after takeoff. Then another did the same. Everyone aboard died. In each case, pilots had struggled against an autopilot system that took over and plunged the planes to their doom… The combination of an overaggressive automation system and lack of pilot training proved deadly.”
Facebook-powered ethnic cleansing: “It seems everyone with some hate to sell found that Facebook, the world’s largest social network, was a pretty friendly platform to do it on. That was definitely the case for a large team of Myanmar military officers who systematically used Facebook to set the stage for ethnic cleansing against that country’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority in 2016. They employed the now familiar mix of fake news and troll accounts to stoke religious hatred and public fear before they set out to rape and kill Rohingya people and burn their villages. So why does Facebook make our 2018 list? It’s because Facebook hasn’t been able to stop its product from being used as a platform for organized hate crimes.”
The Courage to Act
You will be faced with difficult ethical problems in your life and careers.
Going full Aristotle: “We become builders…by building, and we become harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.”
Pre-Midterm Q&A
Pre-Midterm Q&A