Visits and book donations via its rita rock Stars Program and to fund grants for libraries in texas, so your purchases make a huge difference in the lives of texas kids. So please by early and often. The texas book festival is also in a a book drive this weekendo raise money to a rebuilt texas labor is affected by hurricane harvey. So if you donate 15 at any registered to buy book for reading rockstar, student, the texas book festival will match your donation with book to rebuild a library affected by the hurricane. So one book purchase puts three books in a library. So please keep that in mind. All right, so it is my very great pleasure to be here with ellen ullman. She is im just going to read a little of her bio. She wrote her First Computer Program in 1978 commit on top a 20 year career as a programmer and software engineer. Her essays and books have become essential reading in describing the social, emotional and political effects and personal effects of technology in our lives. She is author of two novels, by blood, and the bug which was a runnerup for the hemingway awarded the first book was in times notable book. The book would talk about today is tritone no. That was her previous memoir. Forgive me. What we talk about here is life in code, a personal history of technology. We go way back. I edited her at harpers magazine when i was an editor there. She was writing about technology. I was an editor at one of the oldest magazines in the country, a stored print publication and now were kind of switched roles. Now i am an internet editor for the intercept, and shes a novelist and distinguished memoirist. So interesting how our careers have intertwined and crossed, and so speedy that was a wonderful experience for me. You are my editor. There was a piece in the book called programming the posthuman. Its a long piece, and which i talk about can we make a robot . Given the consciousness and selfawareness and others substrate, as celica . Is a complicated question and i think i gave you, roger, like 20,000 words, and thats very long for a magazine. You were brilliant in tamping that down. And i give you all kinds of footnotes to give the source of injury happy about that. It was a wonderful collaboration and i just want to give the credit, i spoke about the other day. There was one moment in their i was talking about how this simulation was meant to represent what human beings really were, the image of man. I had that in italics and roger did the editor thing where he said alan, you dont need a complex. Trust your writing. Thats how they get away with it. It was true, the right is so strong and hope youll pick up the book. It covers the whole suite of her career and really life. I thought we would start off with a simple question, which is the beginning, what was it, tell us about what got you interested in computers and programming and technology in general . Ill try to be brief. It started when i was just finishing college at cornell and of the group called the video project. This was a time when the first personal video recorder was available, the sony. It was a great excitement in the air because at that point behemoth corporations controlled what was being into television and what could be made on video. Sadly you could do it yourself. This sounds like the coming of the pc, it very much had that fervor in the sense we can change the world. In the course of it i found a like doing a mission, i like doing the recording and editing. It felt cool to go Walking Around with cables over my shoulder. Former english major calling around the floor plug in video come in and out, in and out, i just found fantastic fun. Later i left college down which all good people must do finally, hang around the college down, not good for the soul. I happen to go walking in Market Street one day come in the window of the radioshack store, radioshack dearly departed the last place you could find a soldering gun, there was a trs 80, and early microcomputer. Affection known as the trashy. Completely on impulse i bought it. I thought maybe this is like a sony, you could make stuff with. Can you make art . Can you do social activism . Well, turns out to involve Computer Programming. How hard can that be . It turned out to be hard. There was a lot of hair pulling involves and cursing, kind of what you see about programmer staying up all night, all day in the pajamas forgetting to eat. Then at some point i began to figure it out. Ill bring in briefly my honors thesis was about macbeth and macbeth if we know the play is about complication of time, whats the future, which will happen, trying to unwind what comes first and second is kind of not trivial. The same thing was true with basic code. You could get all squirreled up in it, called spaghetti code. So i can figure out this code. My First Computer Program was, imagine, and image or a graphic of a bouncing ball and how it lost it was reprinted and it showed this curve. When i i got it working i sat k and i went, oh god, it worked. I i found it was a tremendous pleasure. And i said this is great. I went on to take a job as a programmer, and that was because i needed money. And then found that even though it was work, i i found it was still fascinating by giving, you think something, you draw out and then somehow it stops being mental entrance into this physical operating thing, and that changes states that stated me. When you started work, you entered a world that was overwhelmingly male. And this comes up again and again throughout the book, this culture, this maledominated programming culture. Were you conscious of yourself as a pioneer, or were you more like a spy . A spy from the world of grownups into this world of boy, man in perpetual adolescence. It wasnt like that to begin with. The First Company i worked with was a time when business, computing was exploding. There were not a lot of Computer Program at the rent, who anyone would ever touched the machine and got a program working got a job. A lot of the people i worked with were explorers like me. They had with backgrounds, classics, a former dancer. They were fun to work with. But as time went by there were more, those who would come through engineering schools, and they had degrees. Then the tenor of things changed. I encountered a lot of uncommunicative men, men who also made it very hard for me because i was not allowed to make mistakes. Computer programming is an exercise in failure. To write code is to write bugs. Then you move them one by one by one. Its all about failure and how you deal with it. But i wasnt allowed to make mistakes. I was humiliated sometimes, very clearly. Well, you left that day and i couldnt get my visit and that working and so maybe you dont like this job. Sometimes outright, and i had this one instance i had to go ask a client system and they lived way out in the mojave practically, and i was fixing this guys system and he had greasy hair and the war this horrible polyester shirt, and he sat the rubbing my back the whole time i worked. I thought this guys going to snap my brother what easy, 11 . I change chairs and he would never stop and he would never stop. And i thought what do i do . What do i do . And is a something i talked about with women, what do you do in this situation . Now, at the time i was rather new at all this, and this was the kind of most physical, he was getting touchingly more and more intimate places. You know, i just changed chairs. I just changed chairs and then i started standing up. Which made it harder for him. At some point out that im going to just blow up his alsisi. Im going to put a bomb in this thing. [laughing] and going to look like its working now and the going to live in whole thing is going to blow up. And i didnt do it. I didnt do it because i wanted to go back from this trip and say i fixed this system. And that i kind of faced him down. I didnt want to get in trouble with my career. Now, that is, i dont know if that was the right answer. Acting i thought it was. Now i wonder, you know, what happened to the punkish meat that would have him up . Maybe it was the right thing to do and i think this is exactly what women cope with now. What is the right thing to do . How much do you protest . How much do just say go away . Just thinking your mind this guy is a jerk. When someone really goes beyond that and goes into criminal behavior, this is a different thing. After talking to someone who interview me and i was very surprised to find myself saying there are kind of levels of this. One is you kind of, you are a jerk. And then its just, well, they are boys and just tell yourself youre smarter than they are no matter what they think. When it goes into criminal behavior, that is where all crosses the line right now and thats the explosion were seeing. In all professions. Im excited about this. So you also talk about how this engineering culture becomes codified, and how, it goes to a very important scene, i do want to get ahead of myself but theres a sense in which where code becomes created and takes on life of its own, and that the culture of the coders he comes a kind of sedimentary level in the code and the culture at the larger culture then becomes, has to conform to the kind of, to the coat that is being laid up almost like the constitution. You were present and i was present when the web first began to arrive. In the mid90s you had been on the scene for a long time. You had come out of the unix culture, the commandline culture, the sort of hardcore of computing. And then we saw, wed already seen the rise of the graphic user interface with a mac and only windows programs, but didnt then suddenly theres this whole new system, this World Wide Web began to appear and you are suspicious from the beginning. What was it that tipped you off . Because were not be getting to see some of the fruit of the decisions that were made early on. Well, fruit, speedy more than food perhaps. It was called an the ugly blossom which i think is more appropriate. That is a big question. My first suspicion is that there were these mostly men who thought this is going to create a golden future, and out of it will come and you supreme being smarter than we are, and we should just shrine at this and this is our human beings golden future. Now right away, thats enough to make you suspicious. Then i saw this time called this intermediation. The idea was go to this website. Dont use these brokers, these agents, these teachers, these curators, these journalists, mainstream media, and come to us because they are just out for themselves. They are not so smart. They are fooling you, taking your money. These are people who have a lot of expertise. Granted, you paid them, but then suddenly im going to take a travel agent, everyone thinks its so great, you get, you could call a travel agent and say i want to go here and here and there, and they can even find you an upgrade because they have a beeline, hotline to the airline. Or you can spend hours online looking for the cheapest fare. So we created this illusion of endless choice, endless fulfillment. Once you enter into that world, it seems you enter this fantasy of utter happiness. Whatever you desire will be out there, just keep looking. This happened to me. I needed a new faucet. Normally i would have gone into a Plumbing Supplier and pick something out and hired somebody. One day, maybe two. I got on the web and dean hellman websites there are that sell faucets . Turned out to be like 100. And i spent days, weeks sitting there looking at faucets. I never knew the universe of single hole, singlehanded faucets could be so huge. It was a kind of, what i saw e web doing to you. It grabbed me into this terrible unhappiness that suddenly i realize these things were repeating. There wasnt an endless universe of these things. I was torturing myself with the illusion that my desire, my perfect own desire was out there to be fulfilled. So went to a Plumbing Supply store, pick one out. Had a plumber install it here one day, done. Does that pretty well covered . I think that those. Theres a crucial chapter in the book where you go to a conference, and its a computer freedom and privacy conference, and it gets to what i think of as the libertarian paradox of the web architecture. The original version of the unit versus what we are experiencing now. So tell us a little bit about that. There were some very take personalities who had a kind of conversion experience that i think gets to the heart of the predicament were facing now with the corporatization of the internet. There was this a dream that the internet would be his free and open discussion. There are some friends here who remember this, involved in those early days. The feeling of trust and discussion among equals and a sense of decorum, and there was a lot of kind of ugly back and forth. People in general have impulse to kind of quiet those things down and to step in. In the kind of natural way. And then its corporate company, company begin to say there are all these people there. How can i monetize these people who have eyeballs on the screen . Of course you all know that now, we consume for 25 years to where everything you see has an add on it, youre being tracked i dont have to tell you about that. In the year 2000, credited with creating hyperlinking and the web itself, suddenly say you know what, there are libertarians and theyre supposed to be against government, not business and some are going like well, corporations are taking over the web. Im not for regulation, but, but dot dot dot. This is heresy according to the libertarian philosophy. The idea that would be regulation of any human activity, government was the devil. So even though who had this dream are beginning to see that it was poisoned. And did not know how to turn. Regulation did not happen. They were naturally against it. You could see where we are today. Today. It was a turning point. A very important algorithm was there and suddenly, libertarian mathematician proclaiming socialism. People have really changed their minds about whats happening. I was both happy and, i dont know, worried. I know, i thought these conversions came too late. You expressed it very well as, its really a question of law as code, or how did you put it . The rule of law versus the rule of code. Rule of code is not necessarily as you put it, its not necessarily a democratic or even a pleasant regime that we are entering into. What i was struck about was how prophetic that conference was because now were getting to the point where the entire internet is controlled by four or five massive corporations and we are beginning really to see the political effects of that. Now, we worked together on the programming the posthuman, which was i think a very profound essay about Artificial Intelligence and some of the cyber and fundamental, as you see them, and i tend to agree very much, errors that a going into the design of the systems. What is it about this approach to technology that you find so maddening or dangerous . This approach, which this . The Artificial Intelligence, the dream of Artificial Intelligence. When we worked on program in the posthuman, the idea was the attempt to create robots who had the selfawareness and the ability to function the way human beings did. That they were not only simulations of what we were, they were what we were in the abstract. They defined as people come at first we were called the brain was a computer. Then the brain was seen as an ant colony. And preach this very elaborate structure, nobodys telling them what to do from on high. Small little interactions. That was at least thats how we function. But over and over they kept coming across this thing that Rodney Brooks, a wellknown robot assistant at the time come his group called it the c word, and he met consciousness. He asked me what consciousness was born . Do you know what consciousness is . I sat down and i told them. Well, we are born helpless and we have to know who is friend and who is though. It is deep in us. Someone looks at you, you look back. You are aware of someone staring at you. Look at a dog sometime, boom. This is a million response. So in the course of that jeff to identify individuals. You have to form social groups that are cooperating, family, clans, tribes. Out of the recognition that others exist as individual, one person, different from another, you understand that you also exist. Its called the root of my dfi have these thoughts, this person has these thoughts. Its a survival mode and Rodney Brooks sat there and he went, we cant even get a robots to recognize their own kind. So i think the thing that really scares me now is that workers in Artificial Intelligence have given up the whole process of trying to create a robotic human. Thats no longer interesting to them anymore. Do you remember the film her where, give me the name of the actress. Anyway, she wants to be human. Its like star trek, how can i make it a human being. Some question all the other oss as are called are having fun being computers. They can have interactions, a zillion interactions in a second and they get bored with human beings and often happy as computers. This sky was happening at the i give example of self driving cars. Human beings have 100 years or so of experience driving vehicles. None of that is interesting now to people doing these. They are doing proximity, these kind of mathematical things, relationship between algorithms. They have this way they interact and theres the internet, this whole web of interactions, electronically. And ill go into why, okay, the technological problems in that will take me all afternoon and i will save you from that, but the issue is when you are a driver, the first crashes happen with the car was at a fourway stop. There are rules, if two cars, the time, does anyone remember the rule . If the driver on the right, but most people dont know it and they dont observe it. The way human beings actually work out who goes first is a kind of flicker of the eye. And you read the car. If the cars coming too fast can you can conceits is going to th its brakes and you said okay, so who does a look at your have their head down, if you let go. A social interaction. Its what we are as social creatures. The google car follows the rules. Okay, im the car on the right, i get first, boom. They have the first crash. What we can do is not c proximity, when you drive, people, lets take a good human driver and the lessons. You look far ahead, right . You get a the sense that youre going to stop we waiting for te person in front of you is close. You can read the human driver. Use a car moving in a certain way, the make of the car, the speed of the car and you know that person is going to cut in front of you. There are personalities and driving is a social experience. The att