So much for coming on this incredibly dreary night. So cheers to you all for braving it. I think that especially in the pen or whatever were in right now, it feels like the. Its a lot easier to decide not go to something than it might have been before. So cheers to all of you. Im torie bosch and im the editor of future tense, which is a Longstanding Partnership of new america. Arizona state university, slate magazine. And what we do, we look at the intersection of technology, policy and society. We have a channel slate and its up to the slate team here at slate. Com slash future tense. We cover the future and historically we have live events course. Theyve mostly been online for the past two years. So this is of our very first inperson events and its really wonderful to be back here at new america. Were here tonight. Talk about a book i edited for Princeton University press called are not expected to understand this. How six lines of code change the world. Its made up of 26 essays by technology historians and journalists about specific events in programing history. We have essays on the first Police Beat Algorithm on the code that tells your roomba how to navigate your living room. The first computer virus, the jpeg and much more. And the title comes a famous code left in comment left in the linux source code. Back in 1975. Were about code pretty broadly here in the book, so there are lines of, codes in the illustrations in the book, but were really talking kind of the Bigger Picture that each line represents. And the big idea is to help experts and nonexperts think through how technology is made by humans who are sometimes brilliant and sometimes biased and messy and sometimes just really hungry to get to lunch, get their work done. Were really lucky tonight to have three contributors with us. Unfortunately, elena patel is sick. Elena, if youre watching, we hope you feel better soon. But we have three really great speakers as well so the four of us are going to talk for about minutes or so and then well open it up to q a both here online afterwards, please, if youre in person, stick around another drink, maybe buy a copy of the book if youre so inclined and keep the conversation going. So im going to introduce contributors in chronological order, their chapters. So first we have arthur dame rich, who is director of the Smithsonian Institution levels and center for the study of, invention and innovation and in early 2023, hell be director of Arizona State universitys consortium for science policy and. So welcome to asu hes his chapter you are not expected is called space walk collaborative coding and the rise gaming culture and we have charles dwan who is a postdoctoral fellow at cornell and a senior policy fellow at american Universities Program on information justice and intellectual property. His chapter is called a failure interoperate the lost climate orbiter. And finally, we have willa ramus, who is a Technology Writer for Washington Post and my former slate colleague is chapter is the curse the awesome button. I think we should start by having each of you tell us a little bit about the chapter and sort the story behind it. So lets start with you, author. First, the story. My chapter tells the story of space, which is a kind of become law, become famous. Theres actually a lot of mythology about it online. We had the opportunity to interview the surviving seven surviving members of the people who coded the game to hear their firsthand accounts and then have used that as a basis for this. So the is coded on a pdp one. So deck and outside boston had donated and given this you know mini computer that the term at the time it was intentionally not a computer because computers at the time were room sized machines cost a fortune and they were trying to actually market this to business as something useful for payroll, for accounting, for routine operations. It was selling for 120,000 at the time, which be a little over 1. 1 million today. So not a cheap piece of equipment. So theres this loose kind of quasi pre hacker culture thats formed around a model railroad, some of and railroading of course, is about zeroes and ones switches about routing electricity about doing some of the things that then influence it. But this this group and it is all men some of them are students it others are just in area kind of working at mit, working harvard and just discover this piece of equipment and make a deal with the fact team member whos in charge of it that says if we write you a compiler, youll let us do other stuff on it. And over a weekend write the first compiler for the pdp and then start tinkering with it, writing various programs and were passionate about, goofy Science Fiction movies of the time. They would go down to south boston movie theaters and so they come with a space game and its two planes to space that shoot each other and they put a sun in the middle and the next one says, you know, the sun exert. So he adds that code. And then another one says, well, you ought to be able to escape someones shooting you. So adds hyperspace. And bit by bit, not at the same time, they code up this pretty remarkable game that again becomes legendary decked events early, starts shipping it with each of the pdp ones. So when its installed your corporation to show you that it works, they do it. Now why is that interesting . Well, in part because way they coded the game really pushed this computer to the very limit and gaming has done that throughout the history of computing and has been crucial to pushing computers. Its also been a market maker. So people have bought personal because the games available them. Lets be honest most people didnt buy a personal computer in the eighties and nineties to do spreadsheets. Corporation once did, but not at home. So, you know, the chapter kind of tells that story. And then theres an interesting second and third life to the game itself, the code, which is theres an effort to make it a commercial game in that in california, they set up a pdp and set up some stations and try to get people to pay for money that isnt economically feasible. And then it influences one of the early arcade games that produces, which is basically an unplayable game, a real mess. It then also has life in the atari 2600. At home, theres a space game and then more recently course through the diligence of number of really avid coder historians there is there are some really remarkable emulators online where you get a remarkably accurate given the constraints. I could go on but ill stop. And youve played the game right. I played the game i played it against my 15 year old daughter who can trust me in just about any video game. But not this. Although it didnt hold her attention quite as long as, the nintendo does and charles tell us about mars. Yeah. So its i dont think its quite as exciting as space, but it does involve space. So hopefully thats a bit of something. So yeah. So i came across the story many years ago, i think a lot of people have heard about the story. Where does multiplication error ends up sending sending a spaceship, a spacecraft that was meant to go sort of a mars orion spacecraft ends up all being lost, costing, you know, millions of dollars in lost Space Exploration funds. Well, i was curious, you know, exactly happened with that. And so, you know, i started looking through a lot of the reports that were generated after the after the crash and, you know, some of the articles that were written by the engineers. And it turned out to be a very interesting sort of story on. What ended up happening was that nasas was that it was basically repurposing a program that they used to estimate the position of its spacecraft. You know, when when the spacecraft is going through space, there are no street signs there. So you have to figure out where the spacecraft is basically by adding up all the forces on the spacecraft. This would be really like trying to figure out where your car is by counting up how many times you pressed the gas pedal. But none of it was actually really good at this. But in order to do that, they had to get input from. The spacecraft of all of the forces that were acting on it, particularly a couple of little thrusters that help to push the spacecraft in the right direction. And they contracted that part of the software out to, i think, Lockheed Martin. So Lockheed Martin wrote this Little Program that collected information from the spacecraft, turned into a data file that then fed into Nasas Program and Program Expected metric units, except except the the the Lockheed Martin program produced imperial and as a result, everything was off by a factor of about four and a half meaning that by the time that they got to mars, the spacecraft was off by. I want to say like millions of a percent. It was a very, very small amount. But, you know, given the amount of distance they traveled and given that youre trying to figure out where the spacecraft is by adding up all the forces it was it was enough for the spacecraft to instead be in orbit above mars to be on mars. And as a result, it probably in into into the martian or into the martian surface. And so, you know, i think it was just an interesting exploration of what happens when you have sort of collaborative coding thats potentially doesnt go the way that you would hope for it to. Now will, tell us about the awesome button. Yeah. My my chapter is the only one of these three that doesnt involve the spacecraft goes rocket but it was when facebook was Getting Started they and it was mostly just on College Campuses they would notice that when somebody posted something you know having a party just you know just aced that test or like man i was so wasted last night people would would comment like cool or great or awesome. And if it was like a post that really appealed to people, it would just get like comment after coming after comment like 30, 40 people saying great, good, awesome. And so facebook at that time was defining itself in opposition to myspace and myspace was the incumbent. It was the dominant social. It was very it was maximalist. It was very it was like, you know, Everything Everywhere all the time. And facebook, you know, prided itself on being of clean and functional, you know, user friendly. And so the designers at facebook, some of the designers were like, i dont like, you know, seeing all comments. It feels inefficient, like it it offended their their design sensibility and probably their brains as well. And so they decided to try to up with some easier way for people to express approval of a post and so they initially conceived of they started a project called props wanted a way to give props. It seems like in the like button feels, obvious or inevitable. At the time it did not was not you know, it was not clear. Would you you know, would you make would you even make a button . I mean, buttons werent common on the internet in 2007 would you if you did make it a button would it just be a picture . Would have words . Would you would it be upvotes and downvotes would it be a yes and no. And so my chapter about the process of figuring out what that should look like, about the thinking that went into it and also about the thinking that didnt go into it, which was what might have happened. This becomes the universal currency of content across the global internet. And so its partly about the the unforeseen too. So i mean, one of the goals for this book is both to help people who dont think about these things for living, understand the thinking that goes into them among those who do, but also to help people who do this for a living, kind of think Bigger Picture about the work they do and where they might be able think about it a little bit differently. So i mean, i suppose if theres like a moral to your story, what would the moral arthur wow, a moral. Thats great. Now i like morality tales about technology. So i would say one moral that we tend to resist wanting draw from it is that, you know, world in which there is no intellectual at stake and next to no financial reward feasible, it is still possible for a group of enthusiastic people to organize themselves to have some degree of hierarchy. Steve russell kind of becomes the point person, writes the initial code, but theyre also of checking with him. Is that okay as go but also can actually have a disaggregated team asynchronously producing something pretty remarkable so out of the space work coding project its not an organized project we go you know one of the very first video game controllers, a button and a couple of levers that will eventually become a joystick. We go expensive to planetariums, so a star map we get expensive typewriter. So a way to code in text as opposed to having to do it, you know, on a typewriter as opposed to pure machine language coding. Um, so yeah, would guess thats one piece. How you could replicate such a thing often you could pull the right set of people would you get, you know, a much more piece of software out of it that we use today thats little less clear. Charles yeah. You know, i think thats actually just such a such an interesting i kind of carry through a lot of the stories of book, um, you know, just the, the role of the sort of open innovation, this really very academic approach, which of course contrasts very much with the story that i have where we have, you know, a Government Agency and a and a big who are who are doing the coding. You know, i think that the interesting thing about the story that i found at least was, you know, this is a book called 26 lines of code. So where was the code that went wrong on . The one hand nasas says, well, it was lockheed fault. Theyre the ones who are supposed to have multiply by 4. 45, you know the contract said that they were supposed to use metric they use metric. On the other hand, Lockheed Martin. No, no, no, no. It was nasas who made the mistake because nasa told us here are a couple of sample files and the sample files they sent in order to test the program were apparently in imperial units. So they said that everything. Right. So in a sense, Lockheed Martins code worked the way that Lockheed Martin said it should. So were correct. Nasas wrote its code the way it expected the code to be. So it was also the mistake is somewhere in between its sort of the space of communication occurs between two sets of programs thats not part of a Computer Program per say, but it is a form of code way in which theres talk with the specification of we now call interoperability Computer Programs. I think, you know, just at the time that i was writing this the oracle versus google litigation over, you know, the ability to write compatible versions of java was on the table. We had a lot of questions social Media Companies letting other social Media Companies be able to come in and interoperate with their messaging platforms and such. And so the idea that we should really be looking that sort of inbetween space as an important part of the coding that really defines what the environment is and what the technology and policy look like, that seemed like just an important lesson to me. And so i thought that that was and that was an interesting thing that i able to draw out of that story. You will. One way to think about the the moral of the story of the like button. Well, let me back up. So i talked to of the people who were involved in designing and coding and implementing the like button for facebook and all of them said that at the time were building it. They had no idea that it would go on to become such influential tool and that if they had that, you know, they might have thought it differently. One of the one of the people who designed it, a woman named lia perlman, said that she thinks the mistake was a counter on it. So if it just been like, you know, that had one thing but but when you can make the number up it turned gamify as the whole system and you know trans people to try to to try to get more likes and you know in many ways i think the Digital Media world that we inhabit today was was by the like button with the counter. So i thought that was a fair point. Another one said that they that, you know, they didnt regret it because couldnt have imagined doing it differently. They couldnt have known at the time it would turn out. I think, one, if i were to impose a potential moral i guess you know kant said that should that we should universalize our actions like we should imagine what if everybody did the thing that were proposing to do in the same circumstance you know can we envision that world wouldnt even be possible would it be desirable so you maybe coders who are working on a tool, even if theyre at a little startup that has three product managers which is how facebook had in 2007 in a little, you know, a little storefront palo alto maybe they could think what if this little thing im designing to become huge and blow up what might be the downsides. Oh thats asking a and the caveat to that moral and the reason think its not quite that clean so go back to what Ezra Callahan was the internal Communications Manager at facebook at the time and i talked to him about it and he was the one who said, you know, i dont i i feel sort of bad about some of the effects that like one has had. But i dont regret because i couldnt have done it differently. And he said even if we hadnt built the like button, somebody else would have and they probably would have outcompete us and the like button would have become anyway. I thought that was a really interesting and sort of dark point like, you know, even if you were to take this as the moral and apply it, maybe that would just mean your business doesnt win. And no one who doesnt beat you and its the chapter is called the the curse of the awesome button because that was the original name for it, right . Yeah. So there the project was code named props and the first implementation was actually theres a tie in with the collaboration stuff because the first i