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Caleb Thompson

Software Engineer, Herokiu

Speaker, developer, painter, gamer: an eccentric eclectic. Caleb is currently coding mostly in Ruby and Go. He's not a fan of the SPA. He has braved the wintry tundra of Alaska and the harsh deserts of Arizona. He has fired a Mosin-Nagant without blinking, fought the Red Menace, built Battleship Couch, and killed a bear and wore its pelt.

Talks by Caleb Thompson

Day 1
9:45 AM - 10:30 AM

How I built Software to Kill People

I worked on a Wi-Fi geolocation app for a DoD contractor. When I realized its use was to track down and kill people. I was faced with moral dilemma. I’ll share the technical details of the app that made it so interesting to me & discuss the ethics of building tools without understanding their use. In 2011, with a team of interns at Department of Defense contractor, I created a Wi-Fi geolocation app to locate hotspots. It could find the location in 3D space of every hotspot near you in seconds. We made formulas to model signal strength and probable distances. We used machine learning to optimize completion time and accuracy. I was so caught up in the details that it took me months to see it would be used to kill people. What do we do when we discover that we’re building something immoral or unethical? How can we think through the uses of our software to avoid this problem entirely?