Programming My Child
Adapted from BITWISE by David Auerbach. Copyright © 2018 by David Auerbach. Published by arrangement with Pantheon Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
and errors can happen to you and computers
’cause you are . . . a computer!
go and do it! program yourself!
just do it!
explore your toes, explore your nose,
explore everything you have goes
and if you don’t want to do that
you can’t even live
not even houses, ’cause houses are us—Eleanor Auerbach (age four), “The Blah Blah Blah Song”
A few years after leaving Google, I had a daughter, and thus began another long-term engineering project—one that is still ongoing. Parents program their children, after all—and vice versa—and it was in those early months of parenting that my child—unable to make a facial expression, unable to express anything but varying levels of comfort or discomfort—seemed most like a machine. Her responses were, if not predictable, closely circumscribed. I imagined coding up a stochastic algorithm, one that relies partly on chance, to cause her to move her arms and legs jerkily, cry when hungry or uncomfortable, sleep nonstop, and nurse—not completely predictable, but rarely doing the wholly unexpected. (Read on)
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