Quotes from Ellen Ullman

Life is pressuring us to live by the robots' pleasures, I thought. Our appetites have given way to theirs. Robots aren't becoming us, I feared; we are becoming them.

Computer science was then generally a subdepartment of electrical engineering

In this universe of privately controlled education, each charter school can choose the curricula of its choice: Evolution is just a theory, the Bible is a literal history, dinosaurs and human beings simultaneously inhabited the earth, men are superior to women, white Christians to everyone else, and so on. Private and charter schools are like websites: they can foster any belief, shatter the idea that there is anything called truth

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one

You mean you don't stage the software?" I asked him. "You don't test it?" "Why should we? Everything we do is live all the time, always new, minute by minute.This is the Web! Code it, post it, run it, change it, run it again.

And ceilings - ceilings! - that had been invisible, up there, of no account, suddenly insisting upon their supreme and deadly importance.

Neither of us had the easy confidence of someone like Harry Minor, who could gleefully complain of "not knowing a fucking thing," then set about knowing it.

Technology is not the driver of change; what drives technology is human desire.

But now, without leaving home, from the comfort of your easy chair, you can divorce yourself from the consensus on what constitutes "truth." Each person can live in a private thought bubble, reading only those websites that reinforce his or her desired beliefs, joining only those online groups that give sustenance when the believer's courage flags.

A democracy, indeed a culture, needs some sustaining common mythos. Yet, in a world where "truth" is a variable concept—where any belief can find its adherents—how can a consensus be formed? How can we arrive at the compromises that must underlie the workings of any successful society?

Quite the contrary, it was an act of disdain for the complicated interchange known as conversation: for its vagaries, lost and meandering trails, half-understandings, and mysterious clarities. For the meaning of a pun is clear, all too clear. It demands a leap in understanding, to the exact place the punner demands.

Computers have no idea what goes on outside of them except what humans tell them.

There is a purpose of life in the nerd world, which is treating reality as code, and optimizing it. Life becomes a problem-solving activity, and the problem is some sort of lack of optimization.

Then, just when it seemed that only the barest of bugs survived, there would be a new version of the software. And with that, a fresh opportunity for introducing bugs.

I was a girl who came into the clubhouse, into the treehouse, with the sign on the door saying, 'No girls allowed,' and the reception was not always a good one.

I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail.

When I am around people I most admire, I tend to hug the wall.

A computer is a general-purpose machine with which we engage to do some of our deepest thinking and analyzing. This tool brings with it assumptions about structuredness, about defined interfaces being better. Computers abhor error.

Each new tool we create ends an old relationship with the world and starts a new one. And we're changed by that relationship, inevitably. It changes the way we live, changes our patterns, changes our social organization.

Tools are not neutral. The computer is not a neutral tool.

It is deep in our nature to make tools.

Programmers seem to be changing the world. It would be a relief, for them and for all of us, if they knew something about it.

What I hope is that those with the knowledge of the humanities break into the closed society where code gets written: invade it.

Reading code is like reading all things written: You have to scribble, make a mess, remind yourself that the work comes to you through trial and error and revision.