HOW DID I GET HERE?

Without Sputnik we may never have had Find my Friends. Our first session will provide an introduction to the course as well as a discussion of how the non-linear link between Sputnik and the Global Positioning System (GPS) — which today enables thousands of location-based applications — is an example of the complex and compelling intersection of innovation and policy. 

CAN YOU READ MY MIND

In 2011, Thomas Oxley, a neurologist at the Univerisity of Melbourne, cold-emailed Colonel Geoffrey Ling who was directing DARPA’s prosthetic limb program. The pitch: “What if paraplegics and quadriplegics could power an exoskeleton with their thoughts–without the need for complex and invasive brain surgery?” Surprisingly, Colonel Ling responded, setup a meeting, and upon learning more offered to provide up to $1 million to the project.

VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR
In July of 2009, a happy couple in St. Paul Minnesota uploaded to YouTube a video of their wedding procession dancing to a recording of the song Forever by Chris Brown. Within six months, the video had been viewed over 30 million times, and both the copyright industry as well as YouTube officially had a user generated content conundrum on their hands.

Two years earlier, a mother had posted to YouTube a video of her young son dancing while Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy could (barely) be heard in the background. The legal issues related to this dancing baby went unresolved until 2015.

Then, there was ghostwriter977...

ROBOT ROCK
Artificial Intelligence has come a long way from the "Logic Theory Machine” developed by Simon, Newell, and Shaw in 1956. That computer program independently constructed logical proofs for the majority of theorems published in 1913 by Whitehead and Russell in their cornerstone work of mathematical philosophy, the Principia Mathematica. In other words, a vacuum tube-powered computer had become an electronic philosopher, of sorts.

Sixty-five years and an entire history of AI later, OpenAI released a new version of its generative AI “chat” tool called ChatGPT—attracting the attention of not only Microsoft but also, in time, millions of users hoping to have a conversation with this seemingly intelligent machine.

EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD
In early 1995, Microsoft licensed the code for the web browser Mosaic to create Internet Explorer 1.0—and the “browser wars” began. By 1998, the United States Department of Justice would file its second antitrust action in less than five years against Microsoft, alleging among other claims that the technology company was attempting to “monopolize the internet” by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows at no extra charge to customers.

Fast forward nearly twenty-five years when the Department of Justice sues Google in a case that "centers on whether Google stifled competition and harmed consumers by becoming the default search engine through deals with phone makers and internet browsers."

LOVE IS IN THE AIR
In August of 2005, Alex Tew, a college-bound web developer, hatched a plan to pay for college: divide a webpage into one million pixels—10,000 squares each comprised of 100 pixels—and then sell each pixel for $1. By the end of the year, Mr. Tew had sold 999,000 of the pixels and auctioned the final 1000 dots in January of 2006.

Fifteen years after the Million Dollar Hompage, a blockchain-based platform for art collectors, co-founded by a previous executive from Christy’s, divided Banksy’s famous work “Love is in the Air” into a grid of 100x100 units. This startup, Particle, planned to sell each of the 10,000 ‘particles’ to interested NFT collectors.

PAID IN FULL
Over 25 years ago, multiple forms of “E-Money” were developed by some early pioneers whose work would ultimately inform the birth of bitcoin and other “cryptocurrencies.” Most of these early efforts failed well before the tech industry was treated to the famed dot com crash. An exception to this treatment was Finland’s Avant, a digital currency stored on a physical chip, which launched in the early 1990’s. Avant would survive until 2006—two years before the now famous whitepaper introducing bitcoin was released.

Fast forward to 2022, when the United States Federal Reserve invited public comments on the potential for central bank digital currencies (CBDC).

PRIVATE EYES, THEY'RE WATCHING YOU
In 1994, Lou Montulli, an engineer at Netscape, invented the "cookie"—in this case, a digital file that a web browser can deposit on a user's computer to "give memory to the web." He was trying to solve a simple problem like retaining items in your shopping cart after you browse from one product to another on a company's website.

Thirty years later similar tracking technologies now make it possible to gather detailed data on a large history of a user's web browsing abd behavior—setting in motion a global debate about privacy on the internet.