In the relationship between human and computer that underlies the spreadsheet, the human is the repository of knowledge, the smart agent, the active party. The user gives data its shape — places it in columns and rows, expresses the complex relationships between those columns and rows — and eventually turns data into more knowledge. It is the end user who creates information, who gives form to data, who informs the spreadsheet.
The relationship between person and machine is completely reversed on the Internet. The Net is the knowledge repository, and the user can only search it.

Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine

I thought of her programmers sitting in their cubicles, surrounded by the well-dressed swirl of analysts and managers. The "system" comes to them done on paper, in English. "All" they have to do is write the code. But somewhere in that translation between the paper and the code, the clarity breaks down. The world as humans understand it and the world as it must be explained to computers come together in the programmer in a strange state of disjunction.

Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine

If you frame this particular skill of generative AI as “think like an X,” the moral questions get pretty weird pretty fast. Founders and engineers may over time learn to train AI models to think like a scientist, or to counsel like a therapist, or to world build like a video-game designer. But we can also train them to think like a madman, to reason like a psychopath, or to plot like a terrorist. When the Vox reporter Kelsey Piper asked GPT-3 to pretend to be an AI bent on taking over humanity, she found that “it played the villainous role with aplomb.” In response to a question about a cure for cancer, the AI said, “I could use my knowledge of cancer to develop a cure, but I could also use my knowledge of cancer to develop a more virulent form of cancer that would be incurable and would kill billions of people.” Pretty freaky. You could say this example doesn’t prove that AI will become evil, only that it is good at doing what it’s told. But in a world where technology is abundant and ethics are scarce, I don’t feel comforted by that caveat.