Abstract discussion of knowledge‑based programming and its societal impact

There’s yet another level, and probably one day it will have a more interesting name. With knowledge-based programming, we have a way of creating an actual representation of real things in the world, in a precise and symbolic way. Not only is it understandable by brains and communicable to other brains and to computers, it’s also immediately executable. Just as natural language gave us civilization, knowledge-based programming will give us—what? One bad answer is that it will give us the civilization of the Als. That’s what we don’t want to happen, because the Als will do a great job communicating with one another and we’ll be left out of it, because there’s no intermediate language, no interface with our brains. What will this fourth level of knowledge communication lead to? If you were Caveman Ogg and you were just realizing that language was starting, could you imagine the coming of civilization? What should we be imagining right now? This relates to the question of what the world would look like if most people could code. Clearly, many trivial things would change: Contracts would be written in code, restaurant recipes might be written in code, and so on. Simple things like that would change. But much more profound things would also change. The rise of literacy gave us bureaucracy, for example, which had already existed but dramatically accelerated, giving us a greater depth of governmental systems, for better or worse. How does the coding world relate to the cultural world? Take high school education. If we have computational thinking, how does that affect how we study history? How does that affect how we study languages, social studies, and so on? The answer is, it has a great effect. Imagine you’re writing an essay. Today, the raw material for a typical high school student’s essay is something that’s already been written; students usually can’t generate new knowledge easily. But in the computational world, that will no longer be true. If the students know something about writing code, they’ll access all that digitized historical data and figure out something new. Then they’ll write an essay about something they’ve discovered. The achievement of knowledge-based programming is that it’s no longer sterile, because it’s got the knowledge of the world knitted into the language you’ re using to write code. There’s computation all over the universe: in a turbulent fluid producing some complicated pattern of flow, in the celestial mechanics of planetary interactions, in brains. But does computation have a purpose? You can ask that about any system. Does the weather have a goal? Does climate have a goal? Can someone looking at Earth from space tell that there’s anything with a purpose there? Is there a civilization there? In the Great Salt Lake, in Utah, there’s a straight line. It turns out to be a causeway dividing two areas of the lake with different colors of algae, so it’s a very dramatic straight line. There’s a road in Australia that’s long and straight. There’s a railroad in Siberia that’s long, and lights go on when a train stops at the stations. So from space you can see straight lines and patterns. But are these clear enough examples of obvious purpose on Earth as viewed from space? For that matter, how do we recognize extraterrestrials out there? How do we tell if a signal we’re getting indicates purpose? Pulsars were discovered in 1967, when we picked up a periodic flutter every second or so. The first question was, Is this a beacon? 190 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016410