adjustments will be started and managed and mined for fortunes, of course. The Seventh Sense feels the way in which power has shifted, is shifting, from public to private in this way, masked by coded language, hardware design, corporate structure and the demands for speed and safety we all agree on. Huge shifts in power will occur before we are even aware if we don’t have a sensibility to feel them out before they occur. Decisions about code, search, machine intelligence, DNA alteration rules in labs - all occurring in black box machines or corporations or governments. Several years ago it occurred to me in an unsettling flash: “The most important things that will happen in my life will happen in secret.”
I’m not sure I’ve quite recovered from this insight yet. 2
This same unnerving worry has troubled many people who think about connected machines, and for some time. It’s not only those among us who are pointlessly nostalgic for a different era of devices, when the default setting of our instincts was open, who now worry about this strange tension between function and opacity. And remember - I’m running through all this here so we can all understand how to really grab and use this new source of power in the service of what we desire, and to protect the things we care about. But: What are we to make of systems that work better when they are obscured from us? That we could never understand even if we could see inside? Documents such as The Critical Engineering Manifesto, pulled together by a collection of uneasy designers and engineers, reflect anxieties that stir even inside the hearts of many in the New Caste. “The Critical Engineer considers engineering to be the most transformative language of our time,” the Manifesto begins. “Each work of engineering engineers its user, proportional to that user’s dependency on it.” That is Conway’s or Wittfogel’s unsettling truth. The technical layout of a social network, a medical diagnostic tool or a financial market affects how we or our markets or our government (or our enemies) behave. We are, ina sense, being engineered by the damn opaque systems we are using.
In 1965 the MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum found himself, somewhat unexpectedly, considering this same problem. 175 Weizenbaum had written a primitive computer program to perform what is now known as natural language processing, essentially a bit of code designed to translate what a user tells a computer into clear instructions. This is the work that converts your request to a machine for weather updates into a query that can be turned into an answer. Teaching a computer to answer a question such as “it is it raining?” demands layers of logic and calculation.
In 1965, long before our era of simply talking to our phones or computers, Weizenbaum’s program was a revolutionary breakthrough. So after developing his algorithms, he wanted to find an intuitive demonstration. He decided to build a
175 In 1965: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, W.H. Freeman and Company, 1976 p. 7
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