“And the biggest software problem of all was an idea humanist computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum had treated skeptically back in 1974: “One would have to be astonished,” he wrote, “if Lord Acton’s observation that power corrupts were not to apply in an environment in which omnipotence is so easily achievable. It does apply. And the corruption evoked by the computer programmer’s omnipotence manifests itself in a form that is instructive in a domain far larger than the immediate environment of the computer.” Meaning? “The compulsive programmer is convinced that life is nothing but a program running on an enormous computer, and that therefore every aspect of life can ultimately be explained in programming terms.”