About this episode

Michael Garfield interviews Sam Arbesman about the intersection of code and magic, exploring themes of technology, innovation, and the nature of failure.

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts ✨ 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…

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