Just in time for the holidays, last week the FT released its books of the year for 2009. I have read two of them and strongly vouch in both cases.
The first is P.W. Singer's Wired for War, which is about the ongoing robotic revolution, specifically military robotics. Its a book that you want to blaze through, because once Singer establishes the basic concepts of robotics and where they are going (hint: vacuuming your house is the beginning not the end game), a number of these themes are described in his TED Talk; he goes on to connect various dots of the implications of exactly how these capabilities are likely to be used.
For those of us in infosec, we see problems in various information systems that mainly have indirect impacts on the physical world (credit card fraud and so on), but because they occur in the meta layer they can often (not always) be addressed after the fact. But in robotics, we have the same software issues *plus* we are now running actual physical actions, meaning software problems can cascade directly into the physical space. Have I got your attention? I thought so. Its not discussed in the book, but I have heard anecdotally about some software assurance work at Intuitive Surgical Robotics. ISRG does around 2/3 of the prostatectomies in the US, its basically a medical robot that assists the surgeon in doing much more precise incision and stitching, meaning the healing time for the patient is markedly reduced. You can imagine that you won't want a software bug to cause the stitching in these areas to go awry, the assurance program at ISRG is studied in university programs as a model program.
The second book from the FT list is Lords of Finance by Liaqut Ahamed, the FT selected this as the Book of the Year. Its a history of the central bankers in Britain, France, Germany in the US during the early part of the 20th century leading up. The parallels of the current financial crisis and how the decisions made during that time re-map the global power structures are fascinating.
Which came first? The central bank or the global wars? We need central banks to finance global wars.
Check out "Origins of the Federal Reserve" by Murray Rothbard ( http://mises.org/daily/3823 )
Posted by: slonob | December 08, 2009 at 10:37 AM