by
Ellen Ullman
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Above us, projected onto a screen no one is looking at, is the Netscape browser source code. I stare at it: it's blurry from the projector's unfocused red-blue-green guns, unreadable as it scrolls frantically down. There is something foreboding in this blur and hurry. The mood feels forced. Despite the band and the lights and Andreessen's triumphant pass through the room, I cannot convince myself that technologists truly do drive computing, that it is not all marketing; cannot convince myself that, if we only get the source code into the hands of people who understand it, we will redeem our human souls.
Then Fuller says, "I read an article about how the Federal Reserve would crash everything if our work went bad. It was the first time in my life I understood everything the Federal Reserve did." He laughs uneasily. "I discovered we were kind of important."
Thirty years at the Federal Reserve, I think, and this is the first time he knows what it really does. A nice, competent programmer used to thinking about his work in terms of source code and assembler looks over the top of his cubicle. I hear the fear in hs voice. Y2K is forcing him to learn what his code does in the world.
[...] All this will occur, he says, because the world's systems "were put together over thirty, forty years without any adult supervision whatsoever."
The crowd applauds. It is just what they want to hear. They are like spurned lovers. All those boys we coddled with big salaries, in their tee shirts and cool eyewear, whom we fetishized for their brilliance - we left them alone to play with their machines and screens and keyboards and they havebetrayed us.
[...] I sit in my seat and fume. 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. It is precisely the adult supervision Yardeni should be mad at.
on Yardeni talking about Y2K
Days went by, then weeks. I still did not have a faucet.
People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all.
And that was the state of unhappiness into which the web had lured me. [...] on the web, I was alone, adrift in a sea of empty, illusory, misery-inducing choice.
What shall we desperate knowledge workers do? Diffie asked the audience. "Organize!" he said. We need "the rise of labor again," said Whitfield Diffie, renowned cryptographer and former believer in the power of code. "We need to tighten up the relationships among knowledge workers," he said, "and bargain as a whole."
whaaaat
I don't believe in all of this web-stock madness; I know the game is rigged in favor of the VCs. My father, an accountant and small-time real-estate investor, gave me good middle-class advice when he warned me about the market: it's a crap shoot and you should put in only what you are prepared to lose. But there is no escaping one's guts. The air around me is drunken with greed. The rocketing technology stocks create a force field of desire. I am as intoxicated as I was in those fiber optic nights at Infusion, but crazier. I see the startup boys making millions. Why shouldn't I get into the game of betting on technology riches?
[...]
I call Clara Basile, my longtime friend and financial adviser [...] "Do you know what the profit margins are in the grocery business? Three percent, maybe four. Would you buy Safeway?"
The question stayed with me - Do you have to go to the bathroom and eat to be alive? - because it seemed to me that Breazeal's intent was to cite the most basic acts required by human bodily existence, and then see them as ridiculous, even humiliating.
But after a while I cam eto the conclusion: Maybe yes. Given the amount of time living creatures devote to food and its attendant states - food! the stuff that sustains us - I decided that, yes, there might be something crucial about the necessities of eating and eliminating that defines us. How much of our state of being is dependent upon being hungry, having eaten, being full, shitting. Hunger! Our word for everything from nourishment to passionate desire. Satisfied! Meaning everything from well fed to sexually fulfilled to mentally soothed. Shit! Our word for human waste and an expletive of impatience. THe more I thought about it, the more I decided that huge swaths of existence would be impenetrable - indescribable, unprogrammable, utterly unable to be represented - to a creature that did not eat or shit.
In this sense, artificial-life researchers are as body-loathing as any medieval theologian. They seek to separate the "principles" of life and sentience - the spirit - from the dirty muck from which it sprang. As Breazeal put it, they envision "a set of animate qualities that have nothing to do with reproduction and going to the bathroom," as if these messy experiences of alimentation and birth, these deepest biological imperatives - stay alive, eat, create others who will stay alive - were not the foundation, indeed, the source, of intelligence; as if intelligence were not simply one of the many strategies that evolved to serve the creatural striving for life. If sentience doesn't come from the body's desire to live [...], where else would it come from? To believe that sentience can arise from anywhere else - machines, software, things with no fear of death - is to believe, ipso facto, in the separability of mind and matter, flesh and spirit, body and soul.
[...] About her robot Kismet she says, "We're trying to play the same game that human infants are playing. They learn because they solicit reactions from adults."
But an infant's need for attention is not simply a "game." There is a true, internal reality that precedes the child's interchange with an adult, an actual inner state that is being communicated. An infant's need for a mother's care is dire, a physical imperative, a question of life or death. It goes beyond the requirement for food: an infant must learn from adults to survive in the world. But without a body at risk, in a creature who cannot die, are the programming routines Breazeal has given Kismet even analogous to human emotions? Can a creature whose flesh can't hurt feel fear? Can it suffer?
It was like those moments in your most intimate relationships when you look over and are startled to remember: that other person is not you and is not yours to define. He or she suddenly seems to be some alien whom, inexplicably, you have decided to trust. Even as the two of you lie wrapped in each other's arms, you know that he or she can exist without you, and does just that now and again, in moments, and sometimes over longer stretches of time: sheds you. Yet you continue on, together. And that, too, I think, is an imperative of love.
[...] no escaping it, the joy or humiliaton of every decorating decision you've ever madde, the occasion that brought each object into your life perpetually, inflinchingly present: the brutality of the everlasting.
i really like when present is used as an adj in that way