Ellen Ullman
Author of Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents
About the Author
Image credit: Marion Ettlinger
Works by Ellen Ullman
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1949
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Cornell University
- Occupations
- programmer
writer - Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- California, USA
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Reviews
This is a fascinating collection of essays, all related to various topics around computer programming, predictions about the future of computing, artificial intelligence, and the culture of the technology world. These essays were written over the past 3 decades, so it is interesting to see how some of these topics have and have not changed over time.
I read this right as artificial intelligence has exploded into our daily lives through ChatGPT and other AI models. A lot of the predictions and show more fears that Ullman writes about in the 90s are coming to fruition now, and it's interesting to see how much the conversation has and has not changed since then.
Ullman's perspective as a woman in IT is interesting, particularly as she talks about artificial intelligence. The men who talk about AI envision it as a brain in a box, but Ullman writes about intelligence as requiring a body. As AI brings up concerns about what makes us human, Ullman emphasizes the fact that being human requires having a body, and all of the stresses, insecurities, and joys that a mortal body entails. I think it's a lot easier for men in a male-dominated industry to ignore their bodies than women.
Ullman's chapter on Y2K does a wonderful job of capturing the uncertainties and fears around Y2K, and how the public was stuck between predictions of apocalypse and reassurances that everything would be fine, with no real way of knowing how it was going to turn out until it happened. This will be a perfect primary source for future historians.
As a memoir, this book is often about Ullman's love/hate relationship with technology. She loves coding and has a deep drive to solve problems in code, but at the same time, finds male-dominated IT culture to be off-putting and often downright hostile. show less
I read this right as artificial intelligence has exploded into our daily lives through ChatGPT and other AI models. A lot of the predictions and show more fears that Ullman writes about in the 90s are coming to fruition now, and it's interesting to see how much the conversation has and has not changed since then.
Ullman's perspective as a woman in IT is interesting, particularly as she talks about artificial intelligence. The men who talk about AI envision it as a brain in a box, but Ullman writes about intelligence as requiring a body. As AI brings up concerns about what makes us human, Ullman emphasizes the fact that being human requires having a body, and all of the stresses, insecurities, and joys that a mortal body entails. I think it's a lot easier for men in a male-dominated industry to ignore their bodies than women.
Ullman's chapter on Y2K does a wonderful job of capturing the uncertainties and fears around Y2K, and how the public was stuck between predictions of apocalypse and reassurances that everything would be fine, with no real way of knowing how it was going to turn out until it happened. This will be a perfect primary source for future historians.
As a memoir, this book is often about Ullman's love/hate relationship with technology. She loves coding and has a deep drive to solve problems in code, but at the same time, finds male-dominated IT culture to be off-putting and often downright hostile. show less
This tract makes me think it is a relative to a volcano. Early on and through its middle stages there is a rumbling here and there but often nothing much seems to be happening. Then comes the explosion full of power so quick so violent that you are left dumbstruck of what has overtaken you. This is a very worried book of what the disruptive world of the internet is bringing us with someone who has earned her share of insights.
Quotes: (page 58) “At the time of that phone call, I was rather show more enjoying the whole fuss over Y2K. The public was getting a glimpse of the real guts of digital systems, computers in their physical existence, metal and wires, hardware and software, creations of mortal human beings. Although I had deep sympathy with the social distress, I was almost gleeful that the secret was out: computers fail, sometimes spectacularly. It also gave me particular pleasure that Y2K was poking a stick in the eyes of technical true-believers such as Kevin Kelly and John Perry Barlow, both of whom I respect but deeply disagree with. They had promoted technology with religious ardor. We would become digital creatures; computers would free us from the confines of our decaying bodies; we would float in the ether of that exhaustively invoked cyberspace. It all spoke of the resurrection.”
(page 90) “A democracy, indeed a culture, needs some sustaining common mythos. Yet, in a world where 'truth' is a variable concept---were 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?”
(pages 292-293) “The assumption is change for the better. But rarely I have met would-be founders who consider how the 'better' world they envision may be entwined with one that is worse. Without that introspection, the motto of change devolves into an egotistical motive, a willful blindness to the contributions of the past, not realizing that with every advance there also comes some aspect of life that is diminished or will vanish for good or ill; and we are at least obliged to look back and recognize what was before and what may never be again.
Change the world! Uber is changing the world. Amazon is changing the world. Facebook is changing the world. In their wake follow struggling drivers and deliverers, disappearing opportunities for immigrants to join the middle class, fake news, echo chambers in which anyone can choose to believe anything...this list too long to continue here. But inside the hatcheries of the startups, the founders and engineers must pitch their ideas as bringing light onto the universe, meanwhile assuring investors they will make money.”
(page 297) “When I read a tweet from Trump, I think back to 1998, to the coming of disintermediation, the process of removing the intermediaries who for centuries had been part of our economic and social relationships. We are witnessing a moment when the public was being coerced into believing that the brokers, jobbers, agents who traditionally had been involved in their transactions---even librarians and journalists---were incompetents, out for themselves, dishonest, the next thing to snake-oil salesmen and mustache twirlers. The intermediaries were useless; you could trust only websites, go directly to the internet.” show less
Quotes: (page 58) “At the time of that phone call, I was rather show more enjoying the whole fuss over Y2K. The public was getting a glimpse of the real guts of digital systems, computers in their physical existence, metal and wires, hardware and software, creations of mortal human beings. Although I had deep sympathy with the social distress, I was almost gleeful that the secret was out: computers fail, sometimes spectacularly. It also gave me particular pleasure that Y2K was poking a stick in the eyes of technical true-believers such as Kevin Kelly and John Perry Barlow, both of whom I respect but deeply disagree with. They had promoted technology with religious ardor. We would become digital creatures; computers would free us from the confines of our decaying bodies; we would float in the ether of that exhaustively invoked cyberspace. It all spoke of the resurrection.”
(page 90) “A democracy, indeed a culture, needs some sustaining common mythos. Yet, in a world where 'truth' is a variable concept---were 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?”
(pages 292-293) “The assumption is change for the better. But rarely I have met would-be founders who consider how the 'better' world they envision may be entwined with one that is worse. Without that introspection, the motto of change devolves into an egotistical motive, a willful blindness to the contributions of the past, not realizing that with every advance there also comes some aspect of life that is diminished or will vanish for good or ill; and we are at least obliged to look back and recognize what was before and what may never be again.
Change the world! Uber is changing the world. Amazon is changing the world. Facebook is changing the world. In their wake follow struggling drivers and deliverers, disappearing opportunities for immigrants to join the middle class, fake news, echo chambers in which anyone can choose to believe anything...this list too long to continue here. But inside the hatcheries of the startups, the founders and engineers must pitch their ideas as bringing light onto the universe, meanwhile assuring investors they will make money.”
(page 297) “When I read a tweet from Trump, I think back to 1998, to the coming of disintermediation, the process of removing the intermediaries who for centuries had been part of our economic and social relationships. We are witnessing a moment when the public was being coerced into believing that the brokers, jobbers, agents who traditionally had been involved in their transactions---even librarians and journalists---were incompetents, out for themselves, dishonest, the next thing to snake-oil salesmen and mustache twirlers. The intermediaries were useless; you could trust only websites, go directly to the internet.” show less
A disgraced university professor rents an office in an office building in San Francisco in the 1970s. He soon realizes that the office next to him belongs to a therapist. She has one client who does not like the white noise machine, so they turn it off for her sessions, which lets the professor hear every word they speak. He soon becomes obsessed with the client, and listens to every session. She is an orphan, and does not get along with her adoptive family, and eventually seeks out her show more birth mother. The book explores questions of how much our blood ancestors impact who we are: the narrator comes from a family with a history of mental health problems, and as a child he was always jealous of a friend of his who was adopted, because he didn't want to inherit the family insanity. The German therapist grapples with guilt over the fact that her father was one of the major architects of the Holocaust. As the client researches her own past, she sometimes thinks her parents are Catholic, and sometimes thinks they are Jewish, and either way she is horrified at what that means for her own identity.
The exploration of these themes is interesting, but there are a lot of things I found difficult or annoying about this book. The biggest problem I had is that the conceit of eavesdropping on therapy sessions is very contrived and poorly executed. It is a pet peeve of mine when a lot of story is told in dialog, and the author makes characters speak the way an author writes, not the way people actually speak. The client speaks in eloquent, descriptive sentences, and when she plays a tape recording of conversations she has with her mother, her mother also speaks in eloquent, descriptive sentences: it is impossible to tell these characters' voices from the author's. The therapy sessions supposedly last 50 minutes, so the narrator gets to hear the client's story in 50-minute installations... but I listened to the audiobook, which made it all the more obvious that these 50-minute sessions only contain about 5 minutes of content, which felt really contrived.
Another weakness is that I did not find any of the characters likeable or even interesting. The narrator reminded me a lot of Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley, in that he seems like a pretty normal guy but can easily justify to himself some truly unconscionable behavior. The client is downright obnoxious - judgmental, self-centered, and incorrigible. None of the other characters are likeable either, and no one in the book, even the client, grows or develops as a person. show less
The exploration of these themes is interesting, but there are a lot of things I found difficult or annoying about this book. The biggest problem I had is that the conceit of eavesdropping on therapy sessions is very contrived and poorly executed. It is a pet peeve of mine when a lot of story is told in dialog, and the author makes characters speak the way an author writes, not the way people actually speak. The client speaks in eloquent, descriptive sentences, and when she plays a tape recording of conversations she has with her mother, her mother also speaks in eloquent, descriptive sentences: it is impossible to tell these characters' voices from the author's. The therapy sessions supposedly last 50 minutes, so the narrator gets to hear the client's story in 50-minute installations... but I listened to the audiobook, which made it all the more obvious that these 50-minute sessions only contain about 5 minutes of content, which felt really contrived.
Another weakness is that I did not find any of the characters likeable or even interesting. The narrator reminded me a lot of Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley, in that he seems like a pretty normal guy but can easily justify to himself some truly unconscionable behavior. The client is downright obnoxious - judgmental, self-centered, and incorrigible. None of the other characters are likeable either, and no one in the book, even the client, grows or develops as a person. show less
First of all I was lucky enough to have a good friend who heard about this book on a podcast and gave it to me as a present because she thought I would like it, and I did! :)
Being a programmer for the last 20 years I enjoyed the essays from the late 90s. Some favorite quotes are:
I appreciated the essay, The Dumbing Down of Code and What We Were Afraid of as We Feared Y2K, and Close to the Mainframe (the epic battle of tracking down a bug).
The Museum of Me, originally published in 1998 is amazingly prophetic.
The essay on AI was also interesting. I appreciate the point that using a computer as a model for human intelligence has probably stunted neuroscience research, while I think it is funny the idea of trying to reproduce human intelligence. Making real life intelligent humans is pretty easy (I have made two), why bother with AI reproductions ;)
This book had some great gems, and I would like to read more of Ullman's works. show less
Being a programmer for the last 20 years I enjoyed the essays from the late 90s. Some favorite quotes are:
The code library software keeps a permanent record card of who did what and when. At the old job, they will say terrible things about you after you've gone. This is normal life for a programmer: problems trailingshow more
behind you through time, humiliation in absentia.
No good, crash-resistant system can be built except if it's done for the idiot. The prettier the user interface, and the fewer odd replies the system allows you to make, the dumber you once appeared in the mind of the designer.
I appreciated the essay, The Dumbing Down of Code and What We Were Afraid of as We Feared Y2K, and Close to the Mainframe (the epic battle of tracking down a bug).
The Museum of Me, originally published in 1998 is amazingly prophetic.
I fear for the world the internet is creating. Before the advent of the web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses. Physical reality -- the discomfort and difficulty of abandoning one's normal life -- put a natural break on the formation of cults, separatist colonies, underground groups, apocalyptic churches, and extreme political parties.
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?
In this sense, the ideal of the internet represents the very opposite of democracy, which is a method for resolving difference in a relatively orderly manner through the mediation of unavoidable civil associations. Yet there can be no notion of resolving differences in a world where each person is entitled to get exactly what he or she wants. ... I don't have to tolerate you, and you don't have to tolerate me. ... No need for the messy debate and the whole rigmarole of government with all its creaky, bothersome structures
The essay on AI was also interesting. I appreciate the point that using a computer as a model for human intelligence has probably stunted neuroscience research, while I think it is funny the idea of trying to reproduce human intelligence. Making real life intelligent humans is pretty easy (I have made two), why bother with AI reproductions ;)
This book had some great gems, and I would like to read more of Ullman's works. show less
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