What is software code and can it be thought of like a magic spell?

Are we in the process of building a world so complex that we will lose the ability to understand it?

Or has that already happened a long time ago? And what does any of this have to do with

SimCity or knowledge that already exists but no one is thought to put together, or

inventions that evolve beyond the grasp of their creators, and what coding looks like in

the near future? Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we look at the world inside us and around us to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Thank you. the way they do. This is an I-Heart podcast.

Today's episode is about computer code.

We live in a world increasingly built out of symbols.

We've got strings of code and lines of logic,

and invisible layers of computation stacked very deeply in our lives.

This goes from traffic lights to financial markets, to weather predictions, to streaming recommendations, to all of our apps and our AI and on and on.

We are surrounded by systems that hum quietly in the background and that orchestrate everything about

our modern lives. But it's very uncommonly that we stop to ask what is code really? It's a tool,

but it's also a massive force that has taken over the world. So where does it come from?

Where is it taking us?

And what does it mean to live inside systems that we ourselves have written, but we can't

possibly fully understand?

So today's guest invites us to see code as having an aspect of magic.

We're going to talk with Samuel Arbusman.

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