Code eating the world, but why?

categories: misc

Code eating the world, but why?

The geek version of this title being “* as code”

TLDR; code is short for explicit knowledge

But why is increasing the ratio of explicit knowledge necessary and a trend?

One of the most powerful observation about human knowledge is captured in the polyani paradox, of which the challenge to land back on the moon is the most visible example.

The trend of expliciting knowledge is rooted first in SW as machines can be defined as 0 implicit knowledge intelligence.

Computer scientists have addressed this challenge for humans by building systems to make this training from grounds up always easier.

In order to move knowledge to explicit knowledge, they build the following stack incrementally:

1. code: explicit procedural and information processing
2. code versioning as code (git, svn, … as opposed to file naming and zip file)
3. codespace as code (github code space)
4. pipeline as code
5. infrastructure as code
6. CMS as code

As more and more professions get increasingly reliant on IT tools, this leads to the perception that SW is eating the world, where what really happens is just transfering swath of implicit - domain specific- knowledge, into an explicit knowledge repository hosted on machines (either local file systems or Wikipedia, YouTube, …)

Notes:

polyani-paradox is that we know more than we can tell, or in other words that implicit knowledge is larger than the explicit knowledge.

while youtube tutorials have somehow reduced this gap, there is still a huge gap.

In 2011, Andersen said SW is eating the world.

https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world/