Code.

It's the closest thing humans have ever invented to magic. You write symbols on a screen and reality emerges. Money moves, doors unlock, planes land, diseases get diagnosed. And most of us have no idea how it actually works. Today's conversation is about why code feels magical and why that feeling is both powerful and also dangerous. In a moment, you'll hear why the real risk of code isn't artificial intelligence. It's scale. Tiny ideas multiplied across billions of of lives.

My guest is Sam Arbusman, complexity scientist and author of the Magic of Code, a book about how software quietly became the most influential force shaping modern civilization.

Magic and sorcery. Oftentimes in our stories, they require a great deal of effort and, like, training. And so, like, you have to go to Hogwarts for seven years to really know magic and wizardry very well. And the same kind of thing is with true with code.

So let's go cast some spells and learn the magic of code.

Let's go. Sam Armesban, welcome to the into the Impossible podcast, all the way from Cleveland, Ohio. Thanks for coming out.

Thank you. This is great.

We're here today to talk about this wonderful new book, the Magic of Code. It is a magical book, and like Arthur C. Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. We'll get into that. We'll talk about the future of code. Is it prompting only? We'll talk about spreadsheets. We'll talk about the simulation hypothesis and whether or not the Turing Test has been passed or will it ever be passed, or is it always two years in the future? Sam, welcome.

Thank you very much. Great to be here.

And as many listeners and viewers know, I love to start by doing what you're not supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. So take us through the title, the subtitle, and the COVID artwork. For those that might not be familiar with your work. Hey, book lovers, we're judging books by the covers. We know we're not supposed to do it, but I enter the impossible. There's nothing to it. Let's take a look and judge the box.

Yeah. So the title is the Magic of Code, and it's sort of. I guess it has kind of a double meaning. So there's like the Magic of Code, which is sort of like the wonders and weirdness and delight of computation. Because that's kind of the goal of the book really, is to sort of rekindle that sense of wonder that we've kind of lost in. I think, like right now when we have conversations about technology, it often feels a little bit broken, where we're just kind of constantly worried or we have this adversarial feeling towards it. And those things are fine and valid. But when I think back to my own childhood with computers, it was full of wonder and delight and excitement and Commodore VIC 20 and early Macintosh and SimCity and screensavers and all these things.

And so the book kind of looks at a lot of those different aspects alongside the fact of trying to also try to articulate the idea that coding, computation, it's not just a branch of engineering, it's also this kind of humanistic liberal art that when you think about it, it can also connect to language and philosophy and biology and art and how we think and all these different areas. And that kind of gets to certain aspects of the second meaning of the title, which is that one thing that we can kind of compare code to is aspects of like, sorcery and magic. Not in the sense of like magic, like technology just works, but more in the sense of like, we have had this desire for millennia in our stories and for being able to use text and language to coerce the world around us. And now I guess since the 75, 80 odd years since the modern digital computer, we now have that where you can actually write text and it can do things in the real world. And so I also try to explore that kind of meaning of like taking that seriously. What does that actually mean? So that's kind of the title, the subtitle is How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World and Shapes Our Future. And that one is really kind of going back to this sort of like all encompassing idea of that computation really connects to all these different kinds of things. But in addition to that, it also speaks to the fact that there's this deep history of computing and technology.

And in fact a lot of the aspects that I talk about, about how we think about simulation or certain things around artificial intelligence or connecting computers to biology and kind of thinking about how we can even model like evolution or artificial life. These things were actually present almost at the very inception of the computer. Like people were doing these things very, very early on. And. And so the book kind of looks at that historical thing. And I would say this is also kind of related to this idea that I actually think in the tech world especially there's kind of this, I guess, lack of historical knowledge of technology. I feel like there's kind of a certain amount of ignorance, almost like proud ignorance sometimes where it's like, oh, we don't care what came before us, we just want to kind of think about the new and, and sometimes ignoring what has come before you can be useful. But I do think actually being steeped in the path dependence and the history of technology can actually be very valuable to understand where we are and realize that a lot of the things that we might think are new, they actually have this, this long history.