Search

Results for “Martin E. Hellman”

1 interview · 9 quotes

Conversations

Interviews

All Interviews

The Ethics of Technology: Prof. Martin E. Hellman

Martin E. Hellman is a remarkable man.  He is perhaps best known for his invention, with Diffie and Merkle, of public key cryptography- the technology which (amongst other uses) enables secure internet…

16 min read

From the archive

Quotes

We need to be responsible adults, yet society is- at best- irresponsible adolescents. Our society isn't worried about long-term consequences, it's 'live for today, party now, forget about the hangover...'

— Martin E. Hellman

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

We are at a stage of development where we have 'god like' physical powers. In the bible, only God could create new life forms- yet with the genetics technologies we have, we can do that. In the Bible, only God was supposed to be able to throw down thunderbolts that could incinerate whole cities; we call them nuclear weapons.

— Martin E. Hellman

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

Our ethics are not static, they evolve over time and that gives me tremendous hope. If we had remained static, the progress we have made would have been impossible. The evolution of ethics is essential to our survival.

— Martin E. Hellman

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

I realised that what people do is, instead of figuring out the right thing to do and then doing it whether they want to or not, doing the ethical thing, what they do is they figure out what they want to do and then come up with the rationalisation for doing it, whether it's right or wrong. And we fool ourselves.

— Martin E. Hellman

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

I don't think we can ever be sure of the decisions we make; but there are things we can do. Firstly; get outside help.

— Martin E. Hellman

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

I still believe that nuclear is the greatest risk we face as a society today.

— Martin E. Hellman

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

The American general felt that if we confronted the Russians with a determined show of force, they would probably back down. And you know what? He was probably right; but what does probably mean? If it's 90% then there was a 10% chance he was wrong.

— Martin E. Hellman

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

At first, the 100 thousand million, million keys you would need to search might appear impossible, but Moore's law was increasing processing power and we quickly figured that if you could search a million keys per second on a chip, and you bought a million chips, you could search a million, million keys per second.

— Martin E. Hellman

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

I realised that what people do is, instead of figuring out the right thing to do and then doing it whether they want to or not, doing the ethical thing, what they do is they figure out what they want to do and then come up with the rationalisation for doing it, whether it's right or wrong. And we fool ourselves.

— Martin E. Hellman

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange