1 Paul Hodgkinson, November 3, 2011 at 11:50 a.m.:

Great lecture, marred slightly by poor camera work: not enough focus on the slides.

2 Chris, November 3, 2011 at 11:21 p.m.:

While an interesting talk, there are some historical notes that are not quite accurate. A lot more work was done in the 1980's than mentioned here.

But first let me explain we have to take into the account the political and cold war status that existed at the time. The being the existence and proliferation of nuclear weapons. Often in job interviews, one was at that time asked if you had moral objections in working in this field.

Further to that the technology actually was very advanced, in some ways it was perfect for message passing, because there existed the cpu called the transputer. That was a cpu that was a hybrid designed to do just that, pass messages at extremely high speed. With the significant benefit of be able to connect extra cpu's with great ease and allowing very large arrays of them to be build, only further enhancing the capabilities.

So why is this progress not seen today? Simply put there was a phrase that maybe was stuck in our minds more than today's culture, that being a quote from Oppenheimer, "I have become the destroyer of worlds".

With the military extremely interested in this technology applications, a lot of people just left the field altogether.

I posted this because yes, the technology is exciting, yes the potential is great, but the moral issues today are just as valid as the ones in the past, in fact with financial markets using this technology the risk in terms of damage has just shifted, and we can see what that has caused just recently.

So do think about what the consequences of what your work will cause, before you do it, not like Oppenheimer who only saw the consequences after Hiroshima was obliterated.