Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

It's kind of a cliche to say that even though in some sense our lives change quite rapidly because of

the advance of technology, often it doesn't seem like it's changing that rapidly, like we anticipate

certain things like where's my jetpack and rocket card and whatever and we're not seeing those things.

So we miss the changes that are actually happening. The most obvious example here is the computer,

right? When I was growing up, we did not have computers in my house. When I was in high school,

there was a computer lab. You could go to, when I was in college, you could go to the department

and work on the computers there, but I didn't have my own. That wasn't until grad school that I

really late in grad school that I really started that I bought my first personal computer.

And the very idea of a computer and what it is should not be taken for granted even though

that's what we do. A computer is not just a calculator. Computers do lots of things. The miracle

of the computers we use now is that they are general purpose machines. You can use a computer to

watch movies, listen to podcasts, read your email, play games, calculate important integrals if

that's the kind of thing you like to do. And it kind of goes back to Alan Turing, the one who

first argued for the generalness of computers. It turns out that this feature of computers,

their generalness, their flexibility is closely related to their vulnerabilities. We all know that

there are worries that we have about computer hacking, bringing down the internet, stealing our emails,

things like that. Today's guest is Scott Shapiro and he's going to tell us a little bit about the

philosophy and technology of computer hacking. It's somewhat reminiscent of our recent conversation

with Nida Farahani who is a law professor and philosophy professor who talked about the privacy

issues that come up when you have the possibility of reading your mind with technology, neuro scanning.

And part of the lesson there, the worry was that human beings when faced with a trade off between

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