Today's computer systems are brittle, lack transparency, are vulnerable to attack and require an ever increasing investment just to stay up to date. If a person behaved in the way your computer did, you would consider him or her to be an abitrary capricious jerk with a broken social interface.
Furthermore, things used to be better.
There are many aspects to this problem, but in this talk I'd like to focus on the questions of what can we do to make computers visbily controllable (a phrase coined by DARPA Program Manager, Lee Badger) and robust to attack. In particular, I'll try to show how ideas that go back to the MIT Lisp Machine project and to the Programmer's Apprentice project might have a lot to say about how to build a civil computer.