I just watched this --> Brett Victor - Inventing on principle. In this video, he demonstrates some things he's done with computers and programming that are quite impressive to me. He does this as an illustration of the idea of living according to a principle, or more correctly, causing a new principle to be brought into the world. After explaining with the examples from his own work, he goes on to discuss some other notable people, and the principles they brought to the world.
Watching that video gave me a moment of clarity. I'm writing it up now, and I'll work on the wording over time, but here's a rough sketch of my principle that I intend to bring to the world.
No person should ever be forced to blindly trust a computer to do the right thing. Computing shouldn't be either blindly trust the black box, or get nothing done.
Nobody hands over their wallet to buy an ice cream cone, you can just take the exact change out and pay.
It would be extraordinary for a competent adult to hand their wallet or purse to a clerk, and trust them to take the correct amount of money, and make the appropriate change.
It should be just as extraordinary to give a program you wish to run access to ALL of your files. You should be able just pick a file, or folder, source, destination, whatever resource you deem appropriate, and let the program have those resources, and nothing else!
You should be able to completely trust that nothing else was given to the program behind the scenes.
This is widely regarded as impossible to do. I intend to change that. I know it can be done. I have to convince everyone else.
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