On computers
Since the beginning of our history humans have tried to run calculations on the world around them. From marks on a cave wall, to Babylon, to the first machines of the 1900s, to the silicon chip in my pocket. The tool changed. The desire never did.
Technically, a computer is almost nothing. It is calculation. It adds, it compares, it moves numbers from one place to another, very fast, and nothing more. Everything else, the faces, the voices, the fears, the promises, all of it is ours. We put it there. A computer is just calculation, and everything we see in it is what we projected onto it.
So maybe the real question is not what computers are, but what we needed them to be in each moment of our history.
When the first human scratched marks on a stone, he was not doing mathematics. He was afraid. He wanted to know how many days until the cold, how much food was left, when the animals would come back. The first calculation was survival. We projected our fear of nature onto a piece of rock.
In Babylon they looked up. They calculated the sky, the movement of the stars, and they called it destiny. Numbers became prophecy. Here we projected something bigger, the search for meaning. We wanted the calculation to tell us who we are and what is going to happen to us.
After Europe found America, the world became commerce. Suddenly the calculation was money, debt, profit, what is mine and what is yours. The same neutral operation now carried ambition, greed, empire. The machine did not change. Our desire did.
Then came the first real computers, and it is not a coincidence that they were born in war. We projected fear again, but this time with power. The calculation could break a code, aim a weapon, decide who lives. For the first time the mirror was almost as fast as us.
And now. Now the calculation is everywhere, and we don't even project one thing onto it anymore. We project everything. Our friends, our work, our face, our boredom, the same search for meaning that Babylon started. Never in history have humans been this close to the machine.
And this is where I stop, and I get a strange feeling. We keep improving it, faster, closer, but a lot of it feels like improvement for nothing. New things just because we can, not because we need them. We are pouring everything into a thing that, technically, is still just calculation. And I ask myself: when we are too close, and the improvements stop meaning anything, are we going to be the ones who turn it off, or is it already too late for that.