mankind’s history precisely because they touch in subtle ways on the human heart, on what it means really to live. A friend of mine who runs one of the leading technology firms told me of the unnerving realization that the most important figures at the firm were under 25 - and no senior person had much of an idea about what they were doing. This is an inversion: Usually in a society the most power accrues to those with the most experience, and judgment and perspective. Today, tremendous even decisive influence clusters in the hands and machines of a young caste whose very fluency with the norms of a revolutionary age blots out a whole set of important connections, a group that instinctively feels networks but is deaf to the music of philosophy, history and even tragedy that should inform the operation of so much power. To love risk, to love creating and building - this is fine. Wonderful even. But it’s also not enough. “It happens that programming is a relatively easy craft to learn,” the MIT scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in the 1970s, as computers emerged into academic life. “Almost anyone with a reasonably ordered mind can become a good programmer with just a little instruction and practice. And because programming is almost immediately rewarding, that is because a computer very quickly begins to behave somewhat in the way a programmer intends it to, programming is very seductive.” The mistake, Weizenbaum warned, was to think that easy programming of a machine was really a predictor of anything other than getting a machine to follow commands. It didn’t mean easy programming of a complete operation. Or of science. Or, godforbid, to think you could easily program the world. Programming, he warned, “appeals most to those who do not yet have sufficient maturity to tolerate long delays between an effort to achieve something and the concrete appearance of success. Immature students are therefore easily misled into believing that they have mastered a craft of imme