Ellen Ullman Life in Code notes

“Programming is still a tinkery art. The technical
environment has become very complex -- we
expect bits of programs running anywhere to
communicate with bits of programs running
anywhere else -- and it is impossible for any one
individual to have deep and detailed knowledge
about every niche. So a certain degree of
specialization has always been needed. A
certain amount of complexity-hiding is useful
and inevitable.”
“The Dumbing Down of Programming”, 1998

Yet, when we allow complexity to be hidden and handled
for us, we should at least notice what we're giving up. We
risk becoming users of components, handlers of black
boxes that don't open or don't seem worth opening. We
risk becoming like auto mechanics: people who can't
really fix things, who can only swap components. It's
possible to let technology absorb what we know and then
re-express it in intricate mechanisms -- parts and circuit
boards and software objects -- mechanisms we can use
but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing
is fine while everything works as we expected. But when
something breaks or goes wrong or needs fundamental
change, what will we do but stand a bit helpless in the
face of our own creations? “The Dumbing Down of
Programming”, 1998

“Software engineering [is] not about right and
wrong but only better and worse, solutions that
solved some problems while ignoring or
exacerbating others.
The machine that all the world seems to want to
see as possessing some supreme power and
intelligence was indeed intelligent, but only as we
humans are: full of hedge and error, brilliance and
backtrack and compromise.”
“The Dumbing Down of Programming”, 1998

“Programmers do not decide which new systems
should be built and which should be abandoned.
Programmers do not allocate company resources
to one project or another. Programmers are the
resources. Managers make those decisions.
Corporate officers make those decisions. Venture
capitalists decide which new technologies shall be
funded and which shall not.”
“What we were afraid of”, 1999

“I’ve long believed that the ideas embedded in
technology have a way of percolating up and
outward into the nontechnical world at large, and
that technology is made by people with intentions
and, as such, is not neutral. In the case of
disintermediation, an explicit and purposeful
change is being visited upon the structure of the
global marketplace. And in a world so dominated
by markets, I don’t think I go too far in saying that
this will affect the very structure of reality, for the
Net is no longer simply a zone of personal
freedoms, a pleasant diversion from what we used
to call “real life”; it has become an actual
marketplace that is changing the nature of real life
itself.” “The Museum of Me”, 1998

“The mistake in robotics is the same as that in AI:
mistaking the tool for its builder. In particular, the
error comes from mistaking the current methods of
software writing as a paradigm for human mental
organization. Is cognitive science driving the
science of computing, or is it the other way
around?”
“Programming the Post-Human”, 2002

“The definition of life is hard,” Rodney Brooks said to
me. “You could spend five hundred years thinking
about it or spend a few years doing it.”
And here is the underlying motive of robotics: an anti-
intellectualism in search of the intellect, a flight from
introspection, the desire to banish the horrid muddle of
all this “thinking about it,” thousands of years of
speculation. Don’t think about it, build it –that’s the
hope.”
“Programming the Post-Human”, 2002

“On the first day of the only programming course
I every took, the instructor compared computer
programming to creating a recipe –baking a cake.
It didn’t occur to me to question the usefulness of
comparing something humans absolutely must
do to something machines never do: that is, eat.”
“Dining with Robots”, 2004

“I didn’t think seriously about the analogy (cooking as
programming) for another twenty-four years… I knew in that
moment that my long-go instructor, like my young self, had
been laughably clueless about the whole subject of cooking
food.
To make my machine an intelligent recipe writer, I would
have to reproduce in code the equivalent of the complex,
labile synaptic connections we hold in our minds… The
program of this recipe expands infinitely. Subroutine opened
from subroutine, association led to exploding association. It
seemed absurd even to think of describing all this to a
machine.”

Robots aren’t
becoming us, I
fear; we are
becoming them

Ellen Ullman Life in Code notes

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