Martin Hellman
- Arts & Culture Series - Presented by the Science and Ideas Group of Ashby Village Nuclear Threat or Nuclear Opportunity?
The Manhattan Project transformed ethical decision making from a moral concern into one that is essential for the survival of civilization. Yet society’s thinking is mired in pre-nuclear models of national security. This talk addresses how to correct that imbalance and the role that you as an individual can play in transforming existential threats into unprecedented opportunities. Martin Hellman is best known for his invention (joint with Diffie and Merkle) of public key cryptography, the technology that protects trillions of dollars every day. This work won him the ACM Turing Award, sometimes thought of as “the Nobel Prize in Computer Science.” Over the last forty years, Hellman’s research has focused on the ethics of technological development.