Stillness & Shadows John Gardner (nice books to read .txt) 📖

billions, of the taypayers’ dollars. Welfare’s a minor example, of course. The most obvious and ludicrous is our so-called military defense system—computer-built, of course—a ‘servomechanism,’ as the Pentagon likes to say, spread out over an area comparable to the whole American continent. You’ve read of it, no doubt: the SAGE air-defense system. Needless to say, once we had SAGE, we had to assume that ‘they’ had one too, so we had to apply our computer technology to designing offensive weapons and strategies that could overpower our own defense, that is, ‘their’ presumed defense, and then we had to assume that ‘they’ had similar weapons and strategies … and so on and so on, through the MIRVs and MARVs, ABMs and forthcoming GKWs … You get the point. Computers have changed the world into something not easy to change back from. The kids in the street yell, ‘No NUKES, no NUKES!’ But they’ve only got one hope, in my opinion: learn math, become computer freaks, learn to guess handshakes and get inside the machines. Because the people they’re yelling at aren’t the ones who do the thinking. The ones who do the thinking are little plastic chips.”

“Wait,” Craine said. “You spoke of ‘handshakes.’ What’s that?”

“Entrance code, that’s all. Every big computer has a code you have to know to get into it. You give the computer the secret handshake and it’s willing to talk to you.”

“And it’s possible to figure these things out?”

“To some extent. It all depends. Mostly you get the code from some person who knows it—officer of the company, who’s a friend of yours, for instance. You’d be surprised how careless people are about codes. Mostly, I suppose, they have so little understanding of the computers, they’re unaware of the risk.”

“What are the risks?”

“Theft, sabotage. A good computer freak might get into the IRS computer and erase its whole file on him, or change it to gibberish, or assign it to Richard Nixon. Or he might add new features to the central computer’s program—little subroutines that amuse him or somehow benefit him. For instance, in one of the more elegant so-called computer crimes, someone as yet unidentified got into one of the big electric company computers and persuaded it that every time it rounded off to the nearest cent, it should drop the remainder in his bank account. Three million half pennies a month—that’s not bad pay for maybe twenty minutes’ work.”

“They happen often, these ‘so-called computer crimes’?”

“Nobody really knows. According to the FBI, about one percent get reported; I imagine that’s just about right.”

“And they pay pretty well, you say?”

“I read somewhere a while ago that in the average burglary, the take is $42.50, and with the average bank robbery the take is about $3,500. In the average computer crime—this is just in the one percent reported, within which one percent almost nobody gets caught—the take is $500,000.”

“That makes it very tempting. You ever thought of it yourself, Professor?”

“Naturally. Show me a first-rate computer man who tells you he hasn’t and I’ll show you a liar. I worked as a teller in a bank, years ago. We used to talk all through lunch about ways of stealing money—tellers, bookkeepers, even junior officers. We thought of some really foolproof schemes, but none of us ever took a nickel, so far as I know. It’s a matter of personality, motivation—satisfaction with your work, how your personal life’s going …”

“How much would I have to know to commit a computer crime?” “That’s hard to say. It’s as much a matter of native intelligence as it is your knowledge of handshakes or math or computer languages. I can tell you this: everyone down here except a few of the programmers could handle it.”

“Could Ira Katz?”

“I think he’d have to have help. That’s just a guess.”

“I assume you’re granting him native intelligence.”

“No question. But I think he worked with others, mainly. More a concept man than a hacker.”

“Mmm. A minute ago you said—” Craine paused, studied his pad. “I may have gotten lost, but let me ask you this anyway. A minute ago you said there are two ways computers can mess up reality. One of them you’ve talked about, how computers can change things that happen in the world—how in fact they can become so integral to what happens that they can no longer be, you might say, factored out.”

“Exactly. In the new world they’ve helped create, they’re a vital organ. Shut them down and you shut down the civilization.”

“I understand that, I think. Tell me the second point—how computers intercede, I think you said, between human beings and the world.”

“Something like this. It’s oversimplified, but it will give you the idea. What people think, generally, is that the computer does what the programmer tells it to, and since it’s locked in to effective procedures, it can never go wrong. That’s not exactly true. The truth is more nearly that the man at the console has very little notion of what’s going on in the mind of the computer. He sees lights flash on and off, and he knows it’s thinking something, but he has no idea what; in fact vast hunks of the computer’s thinking go on between blinks, not in the central routine of the computer but somewhere in the miles and miles of shadow.”

“I’m not following.”

“No, right. Look. I mentioned routines. Say we have a standard routine—that is a set of algorithmic instructions—for adding numbers. Now say one of the numbers to be added is √25. You can’t add square roots in with ordinary numbers, so when we get to √25 we have to stop adding—step out of the main routine, so to speak—and move to a different routine, call it a subroutine, which is designed to do nothing but figure out square roots. The subroutine rumbles along, off by itself, until it figures out that √25 = 5, at which point we ‘leave’ the subroutine and reenter the routine. This detour has taken us, on a slow