Joseph Weizenbaum, professor of computer science at MIT, thinks that the sense of power over the machine ultimately corrupts the

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问题     Joseph Weizenbaum, professor of computer science at MIT, thinks that the sense of power over the machine ultimately corrupts the computer hacker and makes him into a not very desirable sort of programmer. The hackers are so involved with designing their program, making it more and more complex and bending it to their will, that they don’t bother trying to make it under standable to other users. They rarely keep records of their programs for the benefit of others, and they take rarely time to understand why a problem occurred.
    Computer science teachers say they can usually pick out the prospective hackers in their courses because these students make their homework assignments more complex than they need to be. Rather than using the simplest and most direct method, they take joy in adding extra steps just to prove their ingenuity.
    But perhaps those hackers know something that we don’t about the shape of things to come. "That hacker who had to be literally dragged off his chair at-MIT is now a multimillionaire of the computer industry," says MIT professor Michael Dertouzos. "And two former hackers became the founders of the highly successful Apple home computer company."
    When seen in this light, the hacker phenomenon may not be so strange after all. If, as many psychiatrists say, play is really the basis for all human activity, then the hacker games are really the preparation for future developments.
    Sherry Turkle, a professor of sociology at MIT, has for years been studying the way computers fit into people’s lives. She points out that the computer, because it seems to us to be so "intelligent," so "capable," so "human," affects the way we think about ourselves and our ideas about what we are. She says that computers and computer toys already play an important role in children’s efforts to develop an identity by allowing them to test ideas about what is alive and what is not.
    "The youngsters can form as many subtle nuances and textured relation ships with the computers as they can with people," Turkle points out.
What is the passage mainly concerned with?

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答案The different opinions .concerning the hacker phenomenon.

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