Science & Tech Quote by Jef Raskin

A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm is Raskin taking Asimov's robot ethics and aiming them at the real victim of everyday computing: your unfinished draft, your unsaved spreadsheet, your half-edited photo. The line reads like a commandment, but the bite is in how accusatory it is. It implies the default state of computers has been the opposite - systems that casually endanger labor with crashes, confusing interfaces, silent failures, and the constant low-grade threat that a single misclick can vaporize hours.

The specific intent is practical, not sci-fi: design machines that behave like conscientious collaborators. Not just "don't delete files", but actively prevent loss, anticipate user error, and treat preservation as a first-order requirement. The phrase "through inaction" is the moral trapdoor. It's not enough for software to avoid malicious acts; negligence counts. If autosave is missing, if undo is shallow, if recovery is brittle, the computer is culpable.

Context matters: Raskin was a human-computer interaction visionary (and an early Macintosh architect) arguing against the industry's macho tolerance for breakage. This is a manifesto for humane computing, where the burden shifts from users managing fragility to systems managing complexity. The subtext is a rebuke to a culture that treats data loss as a rite of passage, as if suffering proves competence. Raskin insists the machine should carry the anxiety - so the human can do the work.