A timely, witty, and mind-broadening exploration by a humanist-scientist into how technology dominates our lives, providing brilliant insight into how computation and "thinking in code" have shaped the human experience
In the digital world, code is the essential primary building block, the equivalent of the cell or DNA in the biological sphere-and almost as mysterious.
Code can create entire worlds, real and virtual; it allows us to connect instantly to people and places around the globe; and it performs tasks that were once only possible in science fiction. It is a superpower, and not just in a technical sense. As vividly illustrated by Samuel Arbesman, it is the ultimate connector, providing new insight and meaning into everything from philosophy to language, narrative, and even our patterns of thought.
Code has become as important as water or electricity. If the software that houses the code fails, so do computers, phones, traffic lights, subway systems, airports, any modern cars, and most integrated systems, including the power grid. Since the mid-twentieth century we have lived in a world imagined and created by code-even before we supercharged its influence with AI.
The Magic of Code shows how computation touches every aspect of our thinking and area of knowledge, reframing our relationship with technology into a series of journeys as magical and delightful-and sometimes as perilous-as those of the first voyagers who crossed the Atlantic or the astronauts who landed on the moon. Samuel Arbesman is scientist in residence at Lux Capital. In addition, he is a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation and senior fellow of the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and Wired, where he was previously a contributing writer. His scientific research has been cited widely and has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Previously, Arbesman was a senior scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a research fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He completed a PhD in computational biology at Cornell University in 2008.
