[inaudible conversations] >> hi, everyone. welcome to the 22nd annual texas book festival. thanks for coming out to support our authors, the festival and great writing and literacy. after the session here, allen was signed books in the tent down the way. the books are for sale here courtesy of bookpeople, our great local independent bookseller, and i encourage you to support local booksellers. the texas book festival is a nonprofit organization and its mission is to support low income schools in texas with other

visits and book donations via its rita rock stars program and to fund grants for libraries in texas, so your purchases make a huge difference in the lives of texas kids. so please by early and often. the texas book festival is also in a a book drive this weekendo raise money to a rebuilt texas labor is affected by hurricane harvey. so if you donate $15 at any registered to buy book for reading rockstar, student, the texas book festival will match your donation with book to rebuild a library affected by the hurricane. so one book purchase puts three books in a library. so please keep that in mind. all right, so it is my very great pleasure to be here with ellen ullman. she is i'm just going to read a little of her bio.

she wrote her first computer program in 1978 commit on top a 20 year career as a programmer and software engineer. her essays and books have become essential reading in describing the social, emotional and political effects and personal effects of technology in our lives. she is author of two novels, by blood, and the bug which was a runner-up for the hemingway awarded the first book was in times notable book. the book would talk about today is tritone -- >> no. >> that was her previous memoir. forgive me. what we talk about here is "life in code", a personal history of technology. we go way back. i edited her at "harper's magazine" when i was an editor there. she was writing about technology. i was an editor at one of the

oldest magazines in the country, a stored print publication and now we're kind of switched roles. now i am an internet editor for "the intercept," and she's a novelist and distinguished memoirist. so interesting how our careers have intertwined and crossed, and so speedy that was a wonderful experience for me. you are my editor. there was a piece in the book called programming the post-human. it's a long piece, and which i talk about can we make a robot? given the consciousness and self-awareness and others substrate, as celica? is a complicated question and i think i gave you, roger, like 20,000 words, and that's very long for a magazine. you were brilliant in tamping that down. and i give you all kinds of

footnotes to give the source of injury happy about that. it was a wonderful collaboration and i just want to give the credit, i spoke about the other day. there was one moment in their i was talking about how this simulation was meant to represent what human beings really were, the image of man. i had that in italics and roger did the editor thing where he said alan, you don't need a complex. trust your writing. that's how they get away with it. >> it was true, the right is so strong and hope you'll pick up the book. it covers the whole suite of her career and really life. i thought we would start off with a simple question, which is the beginning, what was it, tell us about what got you interested in computers and programming and technology in general? >> i'll try to be brief.

it started when i was just finishing college at cornell and of the group called the video project. this was a time when the first personal video recorder was available, the sony. it was a great excitement in the air because at that point behemoth corporations controlled what was being into television and what could be made on video. sadly you could do it yourself. this sounds like the coming of the pc, it very much had that fervor in the sense we can change the world. in the course of it i found a like doing a mission, i like doing the recording and editing. it felt cool to go walking around with cables over my shoulder. former english major calling around the floor plug in video come in and out, in and out, i just found fantastic fun. later i left college down which

all good people must do finally, hang around the college down, not good for the soul. i happen to go walking in market street one day come in the window of the radioshack store, radioshack dearly departed the last place you could find a soldering gun, there was a trs 80, and early microcomputer. affection known as the trashy. completely on impulse i bought it. i thought maybe this is like a sony, you could make stuff with. can you make art? can you do social activism? well, turns out to involve computer programming. how hard can that be? it turned out to be hard. there was a lot of hair pulling involves and cursing, kind of what you see about programmer staying up all night, all day in the pajamas forgetting to eat. then at some point i began to

figure it out. i'll bring in briefly my honors thesis was about macbeth and macbeth if we know the play is about complication of time, what's the future, which will happen, trying to unwind what comes first and second is kind of not trivial. the same thing was true with basic code. you could get all squirreled up in it, called spaghetti code. so i can figure out this code. my first computer program was, imagine, and image or a graphic of a bouncing ball and how it lost -- it was reprinted and it showed this curve. when i i got it working i sat k and i went, oh god, it worked. i i found it was a tremendous pleasure. and i said this is great.

i went on to take a job as a programmer, and that was because i needed money. and then found that even though it was work, i i found it was still fascinating by giving, you think something, , you draw out and then somehow it stops being mental entrance into this physical operating thing, and that changes states that stated me. >> when you started work, you entered a world that was overwhelmingly male. and this comes up again and again throughout the book, this culture, this male-dominated programming culture. were you conscious of yourself as a pioneer, or were you more like a spy? a spy from the world of grown-ups into this world of

boy, man in perpetual adolescence. >> it wasn't like that to begin with. the first company i worked with was a time when business, computing was exploding. there were not a lot of computer program at the rent, who anyone would ever touched the machine and got a program working got a job. a lot of the people i worked with were explorers like me. they had with backgrounds, classics, a former dancer. they were fun to work with. but as time went by there were more, those who would come through engineering schools, and they had degrees. then the tenor of things changed. i encountered a lot of uncommunicative men, men who also made it very hard for me because i was not allowed to make mistakes. computer programming is an exercise in failure. to write code is to write bugs.

then you move them one by one by one. it's all about failure and how you deal with it. but i wasn't allowed to make mistakes. i was humiliated sometimes, very clearly. well, you left that day and i couldn't get my visit and that working and so maybe you don't like this job. sometimes outright, and i had this one instance i had to go ask a client system and they lived way out in the mojave practically, and i was fixing this guys system and he had greasy hair and the war this horrible polyester shirt, and he sat the rubbing my back the whole time i worked. i thought this guys going to snap my brother what easy, 11?

i change chairs and he would never stop and he would never stop. and i thought what do i do? what do i do? and is a something i talked about with women, what do you do in this situation? now, at the time i was rather new at all this, and this was the kind of most physical, he was getting touchingly more and more intimate places. you know, i just changed chairs. i just changed chairs and then i started standing up. which made it harder for him. at some point out that i'm going to just blow up his al-sisi. i'm going to put a bomb in this thing. [laughing] and going to look like it's working now and the going to live in whole thing is going to blow up. and i didn't do it. i didn't do it because i wanted to go back from this trip and say i fixed this system. and that i kind of faced him

down. i didn't want to get in trouble with my career. now, that is, i don't know if that was the right answer. acting i thought it was. now i wonder, you know, what happened to the punkish meat that would have him up? maybe it was the right thing to do and i think this is exactly what women cope with now. what is the right thing to do? how much do you protest? how much do just say go away? just thinking your mind this guy is a jerk. when someone really goes beyond that and goes into criminal behavior, this is a different thing. after talking to someone who interview me and i was very surprised to find myself saying there are kind of levels of this. one is you kind of, you are a jerk. and then it's just, well, they are boys and just tell yourself

you're smarter than they are no matter what they think. when it goes into criminal behavior, that is where all crosses the line right now and that's the explosion we're seeing. in all professions. i'm excited about this. >> so you also talk about how this engineering culture becomes codified, and how, it goes to a very important scene, i do want to get ahead of myself but there's a sense in which where code becomes created and takes on life of its own, and that the culture of the coders he comes a kind of sedimentary level in the code and the culture at the larger culture then becomes, has to conform to the kind of, to

the coat that is being laid up almost like the constitution. you were present and i was present when the web first began to arrive. in the mid-'90s you had been on the scene for a long time. you had come out of the unix culture, the commandline culture, the sort of hard-core of computing. and then we saw, we'd already seen the rise of the graphic user interface with a mac and only windows programs, but didn't then suddenly there's this whole new system, this world wide web began to appear and you are suspicious from the beginning. what was it that tipped you off? because we're not be getting to see some of the fruit of the decisions that were made early on. >> well, fruit, speedy more than food perhaps.

>> it was called an the ugly blossom which i think is more appropriate. that is a big question. my first suspicion is that there were these mostly men who thought this is going to create a golden future, and out of it will come and you supreme being smarter than we are, and we should just shrine at this and this is our human beings golden future. now right away, that's enough to make you suspicious. then i saw this time called this intermediation. the idea was go to this website. don't use these brokers, these agents, these teachers, these curators, these journalists, mainstream media, and come to us because they are just out for themselves. they are not so smart. they are fooling you, taking your money.

these are people who have a lot of expertise. granted, you paid them, but then suddenly i'm going to take a travel agent, everyone thinks it's so great, you get, , you could call a travel agent and say i want to go here and here and there, and they can even find you an upgrade because they have a beeline, hotline to the airline. or you can spend hours online looking for the cheapest fare. so we created this illusion of endless choice, endless fulfillment. once you enter into that world, it seems you enter this fantasy of utter happiness. whatever you desire will be out there, just keep looking. this happened to me. i needed a new faucet. normally i would have gone into a plumbing supplier and pick something out and hired somebody. one day, maybe two.

i got on the web and dean hellman websites there are that sell faucets? turned out to be like 100. and i spent days, weeks sitting there looking at faucets. i never knew the universe of single hole, single-handed faucets could be so huge. it was a kind of, , what i saw e web doing to you. it grabbed me into this terrible unhappiness that suddenly i realize these things were repeating. there wasn't an endless universe of these things. i was torturing myself with the illusion that my desire, my perfect own desire was out there to be fulfilled. so went to a plumbing supply store, pick one out. had a plumber install it here one day, done.

does that pretty well covered? >> i think that those. there's a crucial chapter in the book where you go to a conference, and it's a computer freedom and privacy conference, and it gets to what i think of as the libertarian paradox of the web architecture. the original version of the unit versus what we are experiencing now. so tell us a little bit about that. there were some very take personalities who had a kind of conversion experience that i think gets to the heart of the predicament we're facing now with the corporatization of the internet. >> there was this a dream that the internet would be his free and open discussion. there are some friends here who remember this, involved in those early days. the feeling of trust and discussion among equals and a

sense of decorum, and there was a lot of kind of ugly back and forth. people in general have impulse to kind of quiet those things down and to step in. in the kind of natural way. and then it's corporate company, company begin to say there are all these people there. how can i monetize these people who have eyeballs on the screen? of course you all know that now, we consume for 25 years to where everything you see has an add on it, you're being tracked i don't have to tell you about that. in the year 2000, credited with creating hyperlinking and the web itself, suddenly say you know what, there are libertarians and they're supposed to be against government, not business and some are going like well, corporations are taking over the

web. i'm not for regulation, but, but dot dot dot. this is heresy according to the libertarian philosophy. the idea that would be regulation of any human activity, government was the devil. so even though who had this dream are beginning to see that it was poisoned. and did not know how to turn. regulation did not happen. they were naturally against it. you could see where we are today. today. it was a turning point. a very important algorithm was there and suddenly, libertarian mathematician proclaiming socialism. people have really changed their minds about what's happening. i was both happy and, i don't

know, worried. i know, i thought these conversions came too late. >> you expressed it very well as, it's really a question of law as code, or how did you put it? the rule of law versus the rule of code. rule of code is not necessarily as you put it, it's not necessarily a democratic or even a pleasant regime that we are entering into. what i was struck about was how prophetic that conference was because now we're getting to the point where the entire internet is controlled by four or five massive corporations and we are beginning really to see the political effects of that.

now, we worked together on the programming the post-human, which was i think a very profound essay about artificial intelligence and some of the cyber and fundamental, as you see them, and i tend to agree very much, errors that a going into the design of the systems. what is it about this approach to technology that you find so maddening or dangerous? >> this approach, which this? >> the artificial intelligence, the dream of artificial intelligence. >> when we worked on program in the post-human, the idea was the attempt to create robots who had the self-awareness and the ability to function the way human beings did.

that they were not only simulations of what we were, they were what we were in the abstract. they defined as people come at first we were called the brain was a computer. then the brain was seen as an ant colony. and preach this very elaborate structure, nobody's telling them what to do from on high. small little interactions. that was at least that's how we function. but over and over they kept coming across this thing that rodney brooks, a well-known robot assistant at the time come his group called it the c word, and he met consciousness. he asked me what consciousness was born? do you know what consciousness is? i sat down and i told them. well, we are born helpless and we have to know who is friend and who is though.

it is deep in us. someone looks at you, you look back. you are aware of someone staring at you. look at a dog sometime, boom. this is a million response. so in the course of that jeff to identify individuals. you have to form social groups that are cooperating, family, clans, tribes. out of the recognition that others exist as individual, one person, different from another, you understand that you also exist. it's called the root of my dfi have these thoughts, this person has these thoughts. it's a survival mode and rodney brooks sat there and he went, we can't even get a robots to recognize their own kind. so i think the thing that really scares me now is that workers in artificial intelligence have given up the whole process of trying to create a robotic

human. that's no longer interesting to them anymore. do you remember the film her where, give me the name of the actress. anyway, she wants to be human. it's like star trek, how can i make it a human being. some question all the other oss as are called are having fun being computers. they can have interactions, a zillion interactions in a second and they get bored with human beings and often happy as computers. this sky was happening at the i give example of self driving cars. human beings have 100 years or so of experience driving vehicles. none of that is interesting now to people doing these. they are doing proximity, these kind of mathematical things,

relationship between algorithms. they have this way they interact and there's the internet, this whole web of interactions, electronically. and i'll go into why, okay, the technological problems in that will take me all afternoon and i will save you from that, but the issue is when you are a driver, the first crashes happen with the car was at a four-way stop. there are rules, if two cars, the time, does anyone remember the rule? if the driver on the right, but most people don't know it and they don't observe it. the way human beings actually work out who goes first is a kind of flicker of the eye. and you read the car. if the cars coming too fast can you can conceits is going to th its brakes and you said okay, so who does a look at your have their head down, if you let go.

a social interaction. it's what we are as social creatures. the google car follows the rules. okay, i'm the car on the right, i get first, boom. they have the first crash. what we can do is not c proximity, when you drive, people, let's take a good human driver and the lessons. you look far ahead, right? you get a the sense that you're going to stop we waiting for te person in front of you is close. you can read the human driver. use a car moving in a certain way, the make of the car, the speed of the car and you know that person is going to cut in front of you. there are personalities and driving is a social experience. the attempt to completely do away with this and replace it only with technology and algorithms is a big switch right now. human behavior is not considered

an interesting model for artificial intelligence. that can be a startling change. it's a brake that if think is profound. >> so we are right about the time when we should think about questions from the audience. i'm going to ask one more question and then people come if you'd like to ask the question please line up at the microphone and be aware of the camera behind you when you do so. so i made to leave a little more time for this question because it's kind of a big one, but just maybe it will also stimulate some other questions question. looking forward and looking at, thinking about your critique of the early web and your long

experience with computer technology and what you just articulated about the new frontier, which is robot cars, do you see any rays of hope? do you see things like the rise of signal and tour and this kind of -- >> hack. >> tell us about that. >> tour is a means, it's photography, a means to communicate anonymously and that's what, the web did that have security and privacy built into it. it was built as a collegial system for people to exchange ideas. by the department of defense. so anyone who makes the system knows that a key module being added 15 years later is ever going to work. so tour is one of the systems and so what's been happening is

that these cryptography systems, not the cryptography itself although there are flaws in some of them that have been exploited, the installation, there being hacked one after another. people respond to fishing expeditions, operating systems are not updated. it basically, if it's on the web it can be hacked. someone was doing a self-driving car and it got hacked they at least folded over instead of letting, you know. uic hope? i see hope, "new york times" sunday section had a piece of visit technology is not your friend. and i'm like, you are just finding this out now? hello. where have you been? you know, it's out there. there's a whole generation

that's barely remembering life before the internet and one that has never experienced life before the internet. when you say technology is not your friend, this is a new concept to them. and this is, when i meet young people they say what should i do? i could talk about the obstacles and facebook is one big algorithm, and i could talk about that for a long time. i don't think we have time for that. ..

think of these machines have magical and they have no real understanding of the decision-making that goes into her it appeared there is one point in the book and you are discussing whether tech drives change, whether technology is the driver change, which you disagree so strongly. it's not machines and it's not even coders. it is managers making these decisions. here in >> venture capitalist from a ceo spirit >> we want to find friends. perfectly wonderful human deciders cover but they are essentially purchased into avenues that take your money. i'm talking about facebook.

what could facebook have done about the election, how didn't i catch all of this? facebook and google and apple in particular is one big set of algorithms that were written by algorithms that were written by algorithms, and so even the first designers of the system are the outcomes are not quite sure how it got there considered billions of people doing billions upon billions of curators can't keep up what they and this is what troubles me. it doesn't matter how many people you hire, human beings versus grinding algorithms are going to lose. this is what keeps me up at night. do i have any good news? i'm not famous for that i'm

afraid here and i look forward to the millennial generation, those who are new to this because they really do see the problem and they are sensitive to what is wrong with the no code is not mystical. they are not taken in by this is too hard. and i trust them. i've decided i'm going to trust them and i wish their future well. >> that is a good note to turn it over to the audience. please if you have questions, come up to the microphone and please ask a question as opposed to a statement. thank you. >> how do you stay scared when colors flash on your eyelids, when fluoride hits your brain and you can say it doesn't stop you as far as what you just

said. >> i don't understand your question. can you repeat it? >> you stay scared by the algorithm. >> i don't think parker appeared >> what injects into ourselves and our mind. when i think or believe our brain is already learning to combat., how do you then stay pessimistic as the millennial? >> i don't think a brain as a separate thing from a person. the brain is the kind of top of that. everything that happened starts in the body. knowledge starts in the body. even mathematics you can read people. you can cut off your head and have a brain. our thoughts are not like

algorithms. we have a different playing here. >> thank you. next. >> i hopefully have more than half of my programming career ahead of me. i'm wondering what you think of the exciting new challenges you have coming up. >> what do you think they are? >> i'm just throwing this back to you. i'm curious what you think they are. i'm gloomy about the future so i'm looking to your excitement. >> what i think is interesting in what i think is possible is diverging up the moment. i think would be interesting to use technology not rhythms to solve real social justice challenges in the scale of in the previous talk about the

cartels in the scale they operate in how much of that is dark and corruption in corporations and global networks. a lot of interesting things in the open web. >> kind of a culture hero. a bronx councilman in europe has advanced a bill. i'm not sure if it's passed yet, mandating all the algorithms used to make decisions in the bronx including garbage pickup, which schools kids go to, police assignment to examine for bias. this is where we need to go. it's easy when we are up against facebook is proprietary. this to me as a social direction, to understand this decision and we can examine and change them. defensive agency over the cause. >> if i could just add the coding tools that will aid in transparency and accountability

is one of the great frontiers right now. i happen to know several tour developers and people active in creating those tools and i think there is a lot of work to be done. >> could you share your thoughts about how crypto assets are going to impact us in our future? >> okay, crypto currency. briefly for the audience, this is an algorithms that are used in place of money and they are not controlled by any government. they are backed by people willing to believe they are worth something. a shadow for my friend louis haber who as the first patent on block chaining.

a mathematical concept to figure out what happens in what order which is very important for buying and selling. the libertarian kurds do you not controlled in the libertarians got exactly what they wanted. a wildlife. by something like $2000 divides up and down. there are competing crypto currency is now. i have friends i'm tempted to do $100 worth of that chlorine and see what happens -- that chlorine -- i worry however the issuers will control these in a

way that's more powerful than the federal reserve. because it's not transparent. >> watch mr. robot. >> thank you for coming. how can we encourage millennial to preserve the culture of paper invoice and face-to-face and high-quality. >> on one hand they have to go away. greek drama was wonderful. i love greek drama, and that it is no longer it became no longer a means for the community come

in overtime. you can write on your places. there are studies of children who read actual books learn better and faster and more deeply than those who read on the screen. they must preserve the culture of the past that accepting it will be a smaller and smaller number of people and that is a hard transition to make. you like broadcast television. you like it for a while, but if you are young you will look back and it will be like old fogey. there are some trends that are just on their way and cannot be turned back. there are people who love old

television and places that preserve the spirit and ongoing effort to preserve webpages before they disappear. it's good news and bad news. always people who appreciate the value of the things that we cannot expect to pass on the same appreciation in the same way. it will be an older thing in trying to understand it is still useful. >> if you look around colony of young people at this conference and i don't think the prospect of literacy is as gloomy as some people think it is in the conference that this book festival is one of the best ways we can keep book learning alive. just your presence here is a big part of it. >> thank you, roger.

>> where time for one more question. >> of a young woman intact i recently got an e-mail with the subject line diversity higher. tech companies are now realizing the lack of diversity. however i was a recognize for the fact that i have scale. that i can program and that's what i do or not i do or not that i didn't offer because i'm a woman. so i was curious your thoughts on diversity hires in the tech world. >> my experiences whenever there is a conference or a movement to welcoming outsiders, women, minority come the people of other colors, especially with women, a fierce backlash.

there are these young men who have this culture and they went to sleep under their desks all night and the women want to go home. so it's going to be a battle. what i believe is they really hold that in many of the prejudice in the eye before you just refuse to be sent away. you can think that person is a. if a person is a person has power over you, that's a different matter. i hate to tour back on the individual, but to a certain extent, no matter how good you are a country you will go in there and face prejudice. there needs to be viewed or equipment to tell myself i'm gritty, i love this work, and do not appear just hold onto that.

many men help you learn technology. i don't suppose it can answer. >> thank you. >> again, please dig deep and buy books to help the book festival continue its work. thank you. the trim tab -- [inaudible conversations]

>> of course those watching online are welcome to send cost in turn questions by