Nathaniel S. Borenstein’s Followers (4)

Nathaniel S. Borenstein

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Dr. Nathaniel Borenstein’s pioneering email research culminated in MIME, the standard for multimedia data on the Internet. He founded four companies, spent two decades as Chief Scientist at Mimecast and Distinguished Engineer at IBM, and holds 33 patents. He tells the story of his fifty years as an activist and student of how information technology will change the world in his forthcoming book, “The Spirit of a Cyborg: AI, the Internet, and a Future Worth Hoping For.”

7 posts
Nathaniel S. Borenstein's Blog

Nathaniel S. Borenstein isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.

Understanding Minds: AI, Consciousness, and Humanity

What are we talking about? The Terminological Muddle Undermining Discussions of AI

On today’s (October 10, 2026) New York Times Opinion podcast, E.J. Dionne — a writer I respect and admire — referred to the “terrible error of thinking that an algorithm can have consciousness, that an algorithm can be a human being.” Dionne is a careful thinker, and he referred to this as a single error, not two, as

Combine Editions
Nathaniel S. Borenstein’s books

Average rating: 4.13 · 24 ratings · 4 reviews · 4 distinct works

	Programming as if People Mattered 4.20 avg rating — 15 ratings — published 1994 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Programming as if People Mattered: Friendly Programs, Software Engineering, and Other Noble Delusions 3.67 avg rating — 6 ratings — published 1991 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Spirit of a Cyborg: From the Dawn of the Information Age to a Shared Future with Intelligent Machines 4.67 avg rating — 3 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Multimedia Applications Development With the Andrew Toolkit 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 1989 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Nathaniel S. Borenstein (?)

“It should be noted that no ethically -trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.”
― Nathaniel S. Borenstein

tags: humor, programming, software

16 likes

“The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.”
― Nathaniel Borenstein

tags: computers

7 likes

“The perfect haiku
needs no elaboration
mine, however, do”
― Nathaniel S. Borenstein, The Spirit of a Cyborg: From the Dawn of the Information Age to a Shared Future with Intelligent Machines

tags: haiku-poetry, humor

0 likes

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