For the tech community, code has an almost exclusively uniform meaning: a set of instructions, until recently written only by humans, that specify any action a computer should execute.

In his most recent book, The Code Economy: A Forty-Thousand-Year History, Philip Auerswald talks about “code” in a broader meaning of the word — it is the “how” of human productivity, the manner in which we create, refine, and implement the infrastructure that forms a human society. The advancements of code, from the Neolithic era to the modern times, have driven identity and work reinvention. Philip argues that we are at one of those crucial stages now, and his book offers a guide to the future.

Auerswald is an associate professor of public policy at the George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government and a coeditor of Innovations, a quarterly journal about entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges. He currently leads the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network, an initiative of the Kauffman Foundation.