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"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
- Frederik Pohl
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| No Human Programmers | ||
| The idea that computers are too complicated and too important to be programmed by human beings. |
This is an early direct reference to this idea.
| There are nine people on the Council. I don’t know why, though the BC might tell me if I asked, since it nominates and elects Council members. I’ve always fancied it’s so in case we ever screw up so totally that the universe does come apart at the seams and all eras coexist, we can field a team in the Never-neverland World Series.
Technically it’s called the Programmers’ Council. That’s a polite fiction. They don’t do any programming. Computers long ago grew too complex and too accurate to allow a mere human to fuck around with their instructions. Yet there are qualities no one has ever succeeded in placing into the memory banks. Don’t ask me what they are. Imagination might be one of them, empathy another. Or I could just be giving the human race credit for more than it deserves. Maybe the BC supports and maintains the Council to keep itself in check, to prevent it from actually becoming God. There is that hazard. Possibly the BC needs an element of fool-hardiness and prejudice and meanness and ornery self-interest to give it perspective. Or maybe, like the rest of us, it just needs a giggle now and then. |
| Technovelgy from Millennium,
by John Varley. Published by Berkley Books in 1983 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the City Fathers from Cities in Flight (1950's) by James Blish and Vulcan 3 from Vulcan's Hammer (1960) by Philip K. Dick.
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Science Fiction
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'...they moved with the ease of dandelion puffs.'
'...some bored drone pusher in a remote driving centre...'
'These pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern...'
'...the meteor caught and halted just as a small boy catches a swift ball in his cap.'
'We have decided that it shall be but one ship... it must contain everything needed to take us through the generations.'
'You’re the robopsychologist of the plant, so you’re to study the robot itself...'
