Noted technology writer talks at RIT about the problems of efficient coding

Clive Thompson, a columnist for Wired magazine and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, will come to Rochester Institute of Technology as part of the Stan McKenzie Salon Series in the College of Liberal Arts.

His talk, “The Cult of Efficiency,” will be held 3 to 4 p.m. on Nov. 15 in Liberal Arts Hall, room A205. It is free and open to the public.

A reception will follow from 4 to 5 p.m. in the Stan McKenzie Commons.

Drawing from his new book Coders: The Making of a Tribe and the Remaking of the World, Thompson will discuss the psychological reasons why programmers love efficiency, explain why this disposition motivates them to create code for automating slow and repetitive tasks, and identify civic problems that have resulted from this approach to design. By the end of the talk, Thompson will make the case that, strange as it may seem, society sometimes will be better off if code is created to slow things down.