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✨ About This Episode
This week I talk to Sam Arbesman, scientist-in-residence at Lux Capital, Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation, and host of The Orthogonal Bet, weaving together and plucking at the ideas in his delightful new book, The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connected Our World…and Shapes Our Future. Sam is a brilliant scholar, a maverick mind, and a good friend—so even though we don’t see perfectly eye-to-eye about just where the analogy of code as magic works and where it falls apart, that tiny bit of friction makes for a fascinating joint exploration into the liminal zones where our categories fray and their distinctions are constantly rewritten.
In this episode, we discuss:
• Sam’s origin story as a code-lover (00:10:20)
• Code as “algebra and fire” (00:14:17)
• If code is magic, what is magic? (00:20:10)
• Open-source development and open-ended innovation (00:25:48)
• Rethinking the nature of “failure” in the so-called Technocene (00:32:12)
• Navigating simplicity and complexity (00:38:44)
• Acceptable and unacceptable sacrifices to the incomprehensibility of our technologies (00:45:02)
• The squishy overlap between tech and biology (00:54:03)
• The co-domestication of software bugs and people (01:03:22)
• And the emerging age of ephemerality (01:15:55)
It was, as it always is with Sam, a joy. I hope you get as much out of it as we did.
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✨ Show Links
• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations
• Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals
• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org
• Contact me if you have a problem you think I can help you solve
• Explore the interactive knowledge graph grown from over 250 episodes
• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere
✨ Mentioned Reading & People
Steven Johnson - Everything Bad Is Good For You
William Alonso - “Predicting Best with Imperfect Data”
Danny Hillis - “The Enlightenment Is Dead, Long Live The Entanglement”
Moses Maimonides - The Guide To The Perplexed
Richard Brautigan - “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”
Stewart Brand - The Clock of The Long Now
Lawrence Lundy-Bryan
Clive Thompson
Kevin Kelly
Jose Luis Borges
Lionel Snell (Ramsey Dukes)
Nadia Asparouhova
Ursula K LeGuin
William Gibson
David Krakauer
Michael Levin
Chris Langton
Jim Lovelock
Lynn Margulis
Alan Moore
Jessica Flack
Monica Anderson
Jeremy Utley
Alan Perlis
Steve Jobs
✨ Mentioned Episodes
Chaim Gingold on Building SimCity & Simulation as Discourse
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Adah Parris on Neurodivergent Cyborg Shamans & Elemental Tech Ethics
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