Rebecca Slayton is a professor at the Department of Science and Technology Studies and Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Cornell University.
We talk to Rebecca about cybersecurity, the early history of software engineering during the Cold War, the role of scientific and technological expertise in public policy, and how to think about risk and reliability. Rebecca’s book on how knowledge about computing was shaped by and influenced the development of US missile defence during the Cold War is “Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012” (MIT Press, 2013), which won the Computer History Museum Prize in 2015.