Ellen Ullman

I fear for the world the Internet is creating.

I came of technical age with UNIX, where I learned with power-greedy pleasure that you could kill a system right out from under yourself with a single command.

So many people for so many years have promoted technology as the answer to everything. The economy wasn't growing: technology. Poor people: technology. Illness: technology. As if, somehow, technology in and of itself would be a solution. Yet machine values are not always human values.

Technology does not run backward. Once a technical capability is out there, it is out there for good.

It's possible to let technology absorb what we know and then re-express it in intricate mechanisms - parts and circuit boards and software objects - mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected.

Even simple fixes can bring the whole system down.

Closed environments dominated the computing world of the 1970s and early '80s. An operating system written for a Hewlett-Packard computer ran only on H.P. computers; I.B.M. controlled its software from chips up to the user interfaces.

Software and digital devices are imbued with the values of their creators.

Y2K has challenged a belief in digital technology that has been almost religious.

I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how - the depths and variety of human imagination.

Multitasking, throughput, efficiency - these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination?

People imagine that programming is logical, a process like fixing a clock. Nothing could be further from the truth.