mankind’s history precisely because they touch in subtle ways on the human heart, on what it means really to live.
A friend of mine who runs one of the leading technology firms told me of the unnerving realization that the most important figures at the firm were under 25 - and no senior person had much of an idea about what they were doing. This is an inversion: Usually in a society the most power accrues to those with the most experience, and judgment and perspective. Today, tremendous even decisive influence clusters in the hands and machines of a young caste whose very fluency with the norms of a revolutionary age blots out a whole set of important connections, a group that instinctively feels networks but is deaf to the music of philosophy, history and even tragedy that should inform the operation of so much power. To love risk, to love creating and building - this is fine. Wonderful even. But it’s also not enough.
“It happens that programming is a relatively easy craft to learn,” the MIT scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in the 1970s, as computers emerged into academic life. “Almost anyone with a reasonably ordered mind can become a good programmer with just a little instruction and practice. And because programming is almost immediately rewarding, that is because a computer very quickly begins to behave somewhat in the way a programmer intends it to, programming is very seductive.” The mistake, Weizenbaum warned, was to think that easy programming of a machine was really a predictor of anything other than getting a machine to follow commands. It didn’t mean easy programming of a complete operation. Or of science. Or, godforbid, to think you could easily program the world. Programming, he warned, “appeals most to those who do not yet have sufficient maturity to tolerate long delays between an effort to achieve something and the concrete appearance of success. Immature students are therefore easily misled into believing that they have mastered a craft of immense power and of great importance when, in fact, they have learned only the rudiments.”3! Tempting as it may be to call for our world to be turned over to entrepreneurs or technocrats, to let their tools of wired efficiency tear with a fast disruptive enthusiasm into our politics and economics, the reality is that the world (thankfully) does not respond like a cold machine. That delay between an effort to achieve something and its realization that Weizenbaum mentioned, it’s the essence of being human. The delay is filled with worry, hope, debate, exploration, error, success. In short, it’s a hitch that should never be ground out of our system, no more by technology than by authoritarian or totalitarian or fundamentalist doctrines that have ever promised instant solution to any probem. “Just let the entrepreneuers do it” or “Just let the machinces do it,” is no more a solution than “Just let the Nazis handle this,” could have been.
So this is our dilemma: Old, white-haired, network-blinded leaders (and young figures who think like them despite their age) pull us from Washington and other
31 “It happens that programming”: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman 1976), 276
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