Co-Evolving with Magical Technologies feat. Sam Arbesman

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…

People in this episode

Host: Michael Garfield

Guest: Sam Arbesman

Topics covered

• code
• technology
• innovation
• failure
• biotechnology
• ephemerality

Keywords

• code
• magic
• innovation
• technology
• biological overlap
• software bugs
• ephemerality

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Lux Capital, Long Now Foundation

Books & works: The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connected Our World…and Shapes Our Future

More episodes of Humans On The Loop

• Games & Metrics: Agency as Art & Artifice with C. Thi Nguyen · May 26, 2026 · 1h 36m
• Collective Futurecrafting: Play, Trauma, and The Duty of Care with Mathew Mytka · April 27, 2026 · 1h 23m
• Neuroscience in Hyperspace with Andrew Gallimore · March 25, 2026 · 1h 35m
• (Re)Building Trustworthy Institutions with Nathan Kinch · March 11, 2026 · 1h 26m
• AI Doesn't Have To Be This Way feat. Alex Komoroske · February 10, 2026 · 1h 22m
• Fostering "Prodigies of Uncertainty" with Layman Pascal · January 27, 2026 · 1h 29m