Linux.conf.au 2016 – Thursday – Session 2

Machine Ethics and Emerging Technologies by Paul ‘@pjf’ Fenwick

  • Arrived late
  • Autonomous cars
    • Little private ownership of autonomous vehicles
    • 250k driving Taxis
    • 3.5 million truck drivers + plus more that depend on them
    • Most of the cost is the end-to-end on a highway. Humans could do the hard last-mile
  • Industrial revolution
    • Lots of people put out of jobs
    • Capital offence to harm machines
    • We still have tailors
    • But some jobs have been eliminated – eg Water bearer in cities
  • Replacing humans with small amounts of code
  • White collar jobs now being replaced
  • If more and more people are getting put out of jobs and we live in a society that expects people to have jobs what can we do?
    • Education to retrain
  • We *are* working less 1870=70h work week , 1988=40h work week
  • Leisure has much increased 44k hours -> 122k hours (shorter week + live longer)
  • What do people do with more leisure?
    • Pictures of cats!
    • Increase in innovation
  • How would the future work if machines are doing the vast majority of jobs?
    • Technological dividend
    • Basic income
  • Drones
    • “Drones have really taken off in the last few years”
    • Delivery drones
    • Disaster relief
    • Military drones – If autonomous then radio silent
    • Solar powered drones with multi-day/week duration
      • Good for environmental monitoring
      • Have anonymous warfare, somebody launches it, and it kills some people, but you don’t know who to blame
  • Machine Intelligence
    • Watson getting better at cancer diagnosis and treatments plan than many doctors
  • Questions:
    • Please focus on the upsides of lethal autonomous robots – Okay with robots, less happy with taking the machine out of the loop.
    • Why work week at 40 hours – Conjecture by Paul – Culture says humans must work and work gives you value and part time work is seen as much less important

Open Source Tools for Distributed Systems Administration by Elizabeth K. Joseph

  • Tools that enable distributed teams to work
  • Works day to day on Openstack
  • How most projects do infrastructure
    • Team or company manges do it or they just use github
    • Requests via mailing list or bug/ticketing system
    • Priority determined by the core team
  • Is there a better way – How Openstack is different – Openstack infrastructure team
    • Host own git, wiki, ircbots, mailing lists, web servers and run them themselves
    • All configs are open source and tracked in git
    • Anyone can submit changes to our project.
    • We all work remotely
  • Openstack CI system
    • 800+ projects
    • All projects must work togeather
    • changes can’t break master branch
    • code must be clean
    • testing must be completely automated
  • Tools for CI (* is they own tools)
    • Launchpad for Auth
    • git
    • gerrit
    • zuul* – gatekeep
    • Geaman
    • jenkins
    • nodepool*
  • Automated Test for infrastructure
    • flake8
    • puppet parser validate, puppet lint, puppet application tests
    • XML checkers
    • Alphabetized files ( cause people forget the alphabet)
    • Permissions on IRC channels
  • Peer review means
    • Multiple eyes on changes prior to merging
    • Good infrastructure for developing new solutions
    • No special process to go through commit access
    • Trains us to be collaborative by default
    • Since anyone can contribute, anyone can devote resources to it
  • Gerrit in-line comments
  • Automated deployments. Either puppet directly or via vcsrepo
  • Can you really manage infrastructure via git commits
    • Cacti – cacti.openstack.org
      • Cacti are public so anybody can check them
      • No active monitoring
    • Puppetboard
      • so you can watch changes happening
      • Had to change a little so secret stuff not public
    • Documentation
      • Fairly good since distributed team
    • Not quiet everything
      • Need to look at logs
      • Some stuff is manual
      • Passwords need to be privately managed (but in private git repo)
      • Some complicated migrations are manual
  • Maintenance collaboration on Etherpad
  • Collaboration
    • Via IRC various channels
    • main + incident + sprint + weekly meetings
    • channel/meeting logs
    • pastebin
    • In-person collaboration at Openstack design summit every 6 months
  • And then there are timezones
    • The first/root member in a particular region struggles to feel cohesion with the team
    • Increased reluctance to land changes into production
    • makes slower on-boarding
    • Only solved by increasing coverage in that time-zone so they’re not alone
  • Questions
    • Reason why no audio/video? – Not recorded or even hard to access if they are
    • How to dev “write documentation” culture – Make that person responsible to write docs so others can still handle it. Helps if it it really easy to do. Wikis never seem to work in practice, goes though same process as everything else (common workflow)
    • Task visibility – was bugzilla + launchpad – trying storyboard but not working well.
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