John Markoff

For nearly three decades John Markoff occupied the front row of the computing revolution as a reporter for the New York Times, covering the internet worm, the World Wide Web, and the long climb from mainframe to smartphone—and he developed, across all of it, a single durable conviction: machines are not neutral. They arrive carrying the values of their makers, embedded so deeply in the design that users rarely notice them and may never be able to opt out. His books—What the Dormouse Said, tracing the personal computer’s roots in 1960s counterculture, and Machines of Loving Grace, his landmark inquiry into augmentation versus automation—are exercises in making the buried seams of design visible again. Central to both is a clean two-letter distinction: AI, the project of building machines that replace human capability, and IA, the project of extending it—two moral stances, not just two technical agendas, fought out in adjacent laboratories at Stanford for