To listen to Mr. Engelbart that day almost five years ago was to realize that the computer industry, when it started, was not simply about becoming a chief executive or retiring on stock options at 35. It was to remember that real innovation — the stuff that made computers so much more than "crummy factors of production" — comes from mysterious places, wild people, dreamers and tinkerers, and to remember all the skepticism they had to endure.
American writer
Ellen Ullman is an American computer programmer and author. She has written novels as well as articles for various publications, including Harper's, Wired, the New York Times and Salon. Her essays and novels analyze the human side of the world of computer programming.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In this universe of privately controlled education, each charter school can choose the curricula of its choice: Evolution is just a theory, the Bible is a literal history, dinosaurs and human beings simultaneously inhabited the earth, men are superior to women, white Christians to everyone else, and so on. Private and charter schools are like websites: they can foster any belief, shatter the idea that there is anything called truth,
Somehow, even if it means laws and rules and governments, we must find our way back to the technologists’ dream of the internet, the free exchanges among millions of equals; the following of links to links, unobserved, as we desire; the personal web pages we created, of our own designs, defeating the domination of Microsoft’s and Apple’s standard human interfaces. We must go back to that internet, even if it existed for only a flickering moment, or never existed except in idylls and nostalgia. We must route around the new bad corporate net; or create a superset of it; or an alternative. Or something.
But now, without leaving home, from the comfort of your easy chair, you can divorce yourself from the consensus on what constitutes “truth.” Each person can live in a private thought bubble, reading only those websites that reinforce his or her desired beliefs, joining only those online groups that give sustenance when the believer’s courage flags.
It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one,
I peered over at Morty, whom I'd clearly never seen before. This round old man in his empty store, for whom I'd never felt anything but pity, had just told me off in ways he could not imagine. He put it all together: Brian's networks, the bank vice president's universe of transactions, the software I write, the systems I install, the sexy bouts of software writing — all that was suddenly and clearly related to the world's financial center now all emptied of people. It's the modems: computing as a kind of neutron bomb, making all the people disappear, leaving the buildings.
In my world, it would be so easy to forget the empty downtowns. The whole profession encouraged us: stay here, alone, home by this nifty color monitor. Just click. Everything you want — it's just a click away. Everything in my world made me want to forget how — as landlord, as programmer, as landlord/programmer helping to unpeople buildings like my very own — I was implicated in the fate of Morty and the bag shop.
IV. Real techies don’t worry about forced eugenics. I learned this from a real techie in the cafeteria of a software company. The project team is having lunch and discussing how long it would take to wipe out a disease inherited recessively on the X chromosome. First come calculations of inheritance probabilities. Given a population of a given size, one of the engineers arrives at a wipe-out date. Immediately another suggests that the date could be moved forward by various manipulations of the inheritance patterns. For example, he says, there could be an education campaign. The six team members then fall over one another with further suggestions. They start with rewards to discourage carriers from breeding. Immediately they move to fines for those who reproduce the disease. Then they go for what they call “more effective” measures: Jail for breeding. Induced abortion. Forced sterilization. Now they’re hot. The calculations are flying. Years and years fall from the final doom-date of the disease. Finally, they get to the ultimate solution. “It’s straightforward,” someone says. “Just kill every carrier.” Everyone responds to this last suggestion with great enthusiasm. One generation and — bang — the disease is gone. Quietly, I say, “You know, that’s what the Nazis did.” They all look at me in disgust. It’s the look boys give a girl who has interrupted a burping contest. One says, “This is something my wife would say.” When he says “wife,” there is no love, warmth, or goodness in it. In this engineer’s mouth, “wife” means wet diapers and dirty dishes. It means someone angry with you for losing track of time and missing dinner. Someone sentimental. In his mind (for the moment), “wife” signifies all programming-party-pooping, illogical things in the universe. Still, I persist. “It started as just an idea for the Nazis, too, you know.” The engineer makes a reply that sounds like a retch. “This is how I know you’re not a real techie,” he says.
Over the years, as I listened to the engineering give-and-take over the question of artificial life-forms, I kept coming up against something obdurate inside myself, some stubborn resistance to the definition of “life” that was being promulgated. It seemed to me too reductive of what we are, too mechanistic. Even if I could not quite get myself to believe in God or the soul or the Tao or some other metaphor for the ineffable spark of life, still, as I sat there high in the balcony of the Stanford lecture hall, listening to the cyberneticists’ claims to be on the path toward the creation of a sentient being, I found myself muttering, No, that’s not right, we’re not just mechanisms, you’re missing something, there’s something else, something more. But then I had to ask myself: What else could there be?