3. Language, code, our minds and the future
A few years ago I read an incredible book called 'The Shallows' by Nicholas Carr. In it, he explains how the nature of written language and the development of technology influences how our minds work. I remember him describing how reading evolved from being a purely spoken activity to a silent activity, and how that was influenced by the introduction of spaces into written language. Mirroring the fragmentation of written language, he described the fragmentation and exponential increase of information in our world today, and how our attention spans have suffered because of this. But on the other hand, he posits that we may actually be better at picking out relevant information from troves of data compared to ancestors.
Moving to a more abstracted version of this premise is the movie ‘Arrival’. Based on Ted Chiang’s novel ‘Story of Your Life’, the work explores that idea that the language you are immersed in determines your understanding and experience of time. In reality the impact of language on the mind perhaps isn't as exaggerated as portrayed in 'Arrival', but it's undeniable that the language you speak affects how you think, feel, and exist. It's not uncommon for bilingual people to feel like slightly different people when they speak one language compared to another. Taking the underlying principles from 'The Shallows' and 'Arrival', we can say that the the shape of the mind is influenced by the structure, content and presentation (i.e. language) of information.
The question is, how will our minds change further in the future? There is no way of predicting this, but it's fun to entertain some thoughts around how the progressive digitisation of the world might change the way our individual and collective minds may change. Before I can answer this question, I want to explore how programming/code may become more commonplace.
Let's meet in the middle
Some claim that jobs will start to become obsolete as code and the dreaded 'AI' take over. I think this is unlikely - I think human beings and jobs will evolve to use the computational tools we create. Doctors may not be replaced by clinical AI systems, but rather doctors might develop and build these systems to help them diagnose and treat more complex disease. Lawyers may eventually branch in to writing the future's 'smart contracts' on blockchains. You could argue that modern musicians and producers are already slightly further along on this evolutionary track, using tech to create art (tech is not replacing artists - it’s enabling them). Code won't replace human beings in these fields, the people in these fields will instead embrace the power of mutable and iterative script.
The journey towards code as commonplace is already happening inexorably. Firstly, children now have the opportunity to learn programming in school at a much earlier age, and it is becoming more commonplace in the curriculum. Secondly, there is a bidirectional momentum towards people becoming able to write customisable, powerful code. From the bottom up, extensive and diverse programming libraries/packages now mean that even statistically complex machine learning tasks can be written in just a few lines of relatively comprehensible code. From the top down, as people generally become more software literate, the UI of operating systems and apps is also leaning towards representing simple programming languages or databases (think about the introduction of pseudocode 'Shortcuts' on iOS, and powerful database filters on the Notion app which essentially resemble simple SQL outputs).
Musings on the future
You could argue that our written and spoken language is also changing as well. As information becomes more fragmented, our sentences have also simplified. I think that the structure of our sentences are easier to understand compared to reading English from 150 years ago (even if we adjusted for 'familiarity', I suspect Victorians would have an easier time understanding our English compared to us understanding theirs).
What's the next iteration? As more people embrace programming, I wonder if the way we think in code will also affect the way we write in prose... at a time and place where we meet in the middle, and can write code and create programs with as much intrinsic fluency as we write sentences and create literature. Perhaps even in the same language.