Jim talks with Samuel Arbesman about the ideas in his book The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future. They discuss Sam's motivation for writing the book, the wondering vs. utilitarian stances toward computing, early personal computing experiences, scale in programming, AI as a "hinge of history" moment, the democratization of code through AI tools, the dual nature of code as text & action, analogies between code & magic/mysticism, HyperCard as an early programming tool, the evolution of web development & protocols, layers of abstraction in computing, code golf, imperative vs. functional languages, recursion in programming, tools for thought & note-taking software, numeric modeling & world simulation, agent-based modeling & artificial life, the simulation hypothesis, research into "glitches in the matrix," and much more.

Episode Transcript

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension, by Samuel Arbesman

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date, by Samuel Arbesman

The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future, by Samuel Arbesman

The Orthogonal Bet podcast

"As We May Think," by Vannevar Bush

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Martin Henz, Tobias Wringstad

The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald E. Knuth

Network Wars

Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing

Samuel Arbesman is Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital. In addition, he is an xLab senior fellow at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management and a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of The Magic of Code, Overcomplicated, and The Half-Life of Facts, and his writing has appeared in such places as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Wired, where he was previously a contributing writer. He lives in Cleveland with his family. The first computer he used was a Commodore VIC-20.