In this interview in Salon (4/10/2000), Jaron Lanier talked about reconfiguring his view of what computers should and should not be doing. He was initially annoyed by the habit some software has of apparently attempting to think for the user and even preempt his choices. Microsoft Word, for example, kept trying to tell him how to spell a term he himself had invented.

And it's not just Word that spun Lanier into a tizzy. It's the sheer prevalence of these "thinking" features: the fact that PowerPoint shrinks the font when you add too many words, that browsers add complete URLs after the user puts in three letters, and that there's little that most people can do about it.

"[Programmers] are sacrificing the user in order to have this fantasy that the computers are turning into creatures," he says. "These features found their way in not because developers think people want them, but because this idea of making autonomous computers has gotten into their heads."

Not only do people not want them, suggests Lanier, but they won't work anyway.

He goes on to articulate a middle ground somewhere between abject horror of the machines and spacehead enthusiasm. He touches on that chestnut, Moore's Law, confronted by the eternal limitations of software. I think the fact that people keep talking about speed in processing just underlines the contradiction. You can't get to “instantaneous” by going faster and faster, and the real world is instantaneous. Mysteriously so. It's one of those cases where so many intelligent people have failed to notice something fundamental about a question but have nonetheless persisted in being very inventive about it.

Lanier talks about the whole thing in even broader terms:

"There should be a Hippocratic oath. The reason the Hippocratic oath exists is to place the priority on helping individual people rather than medical science in the abstract. As a physician it would be wrong to choose furthering your agenda of future medicine at the expense of a patient. And yet computer science thinks it's perfectly fine to further its agenda of trying to make computers autonomous, at the expense of everyday users."

"It's immoral," he adds. "I want to see humanistic computer science. You have to be human-centric to be moral."

The article also cites Lanier's “One Half of a Manifesto” from November of 2000 in Edge.

Labels: Science Fiction Problems, Voodoo