Book: Moral Codes - Designing Alternatives to AI, by Alan Blackwell

Thank you very much to Mark, Jeremy and Lyr for the invitation to discuss my book with you. Moral Codes is subtitled “Designing alternatives to AI”, but people from critical code studies will certainly have noticed the double meaning of the word “Codes” in the title!

The agenda of the book, as I occasionally observe to colleagues in computer science, is to argue that the world probably needs less AI, and better programming languages. I wrote the book to try and persuade a wider audience (including policy makers) of this, observing that many of the most intractable problems of AI - explainability, alignment, controllability - are precisely the established priorities of programming language designers.

I draw on my own long experience of designing end-user programming languages, especially those that extend the spreadsheet paradigm or support creative imporovisation. These are often diagrammatic, or data-centric, or use direct manipulation, meaning that the “code” they allow is not the kind that easily invites close reading. Which is not to say that close reading would be pointless - I suspect many spreadsheets are crying out for it!

A deeper, but probably subtler, theme of the book reflects on the attention economy of AI, of social media, surveillance capitalism, enshittification and all that. I argue that the investment of attention is the fundamental unit of human consciousness, and that the drive to make machines conscious reflects a systematic devaluing of our own consciousness, as a consequence of the technofeudal attention economy (similar to Pasquinelli’s labour theory of AI). From this perspective, programming is fundamental to the exertion of individual personhood. As Geoff Cox and Winnie Soon said, “program, or be programmed”.

The last part of the book speculates on where vibe coding may take us, through an explanation of basic craft principles in software engineering. But the book was originally written before the launch of ChatGPT, and published before Karpathy invented “vibe”, so those chapters are quite a hostage to fortune. There is an extended historical centre, in which I discuss the evolution of the GUI out of programming innovations of Alan Kay, Ivan Sutherland, and others who all saw their work as a kind of programming. For me, critical attention to all of these technologies benefits from the ability to view them as notational systems, each having their own kinds of code-like properties.

So overall, I would not advocate Moral Codes as a text in critical code studies, because it is not really doing the same thing as CCS. Nevertheless, the arguments are likely to be familiar to students of CCS, and I hope offer some value to the field, by reminding us the ways in which code may continue to be important, even if we become obliged to access it at second-hand via a chat dialog.