Today being the first day of autumn in the old Celtic calendar, and a gloomy Monday to boot, I find myself having some gloomy thoughts about computers.
- Computers as we know them today, Turing-complete programmable Von Neumann machines, have their origins in World War II. Early examples include the Z3 and Colossus (used at Bletchley Park to crack Nazi communications). They were weapons, albeit esoteric ones operated by REMFs far from the front lines.
- One could argue that the history of post-WWII computing is the history of the search for civilian applications for computers, making them useful for tasks beyond aiming artillery, cracking enemy communications, and building atomic bombs.
- Computers are still weapons, even when used for peaceful tasks. An informational war rages all around us, a multilateral dogfight involving nation-states, corporations, criminal syndicates, and individual actors. It’s often all a non-combatant like me can do to avoid getting dragged into this mess.
- It may be possible to frame the necessity for Free Software in terms of the Second Amendment to persuade right-wing types who might otherwise view FOSS as a leftist conspiracy, but at what price?
- Perhaps I should be grateful that computers don’t commonly come in camoflage.
- Because computers are weapons, it is easy to dismiss the ACM’s code of ethics as a hollow farce, which many techies seem to do if they’ve even heard of it in the first place. Hell, I probably don’t live up to it myself, and I should probably feel guilty about that but ethics don’t pay the rent.
There are all sorts of implications, many of them nasty, and I’d rather not think too deeply about them because my day job depends on my willingness to program computers instead of taking a sledgehammer to every FCC Class B computing device in reach while staging a one-man Butlerian Jihad. After all, a single exasperated man with a blunt instrument does not a Luddite revolution make.
Nevertheless, even if this seems like heresy coming from somebody like me, computers may have been a bigger mistake than the development of nuclear weapons.