ergo

Today you have to think you're really smart to program a computer using code. In the future, everyone will program computers using code.

You could conduct a kind of experiment, and write some sort of application using html and javascript. The tools you need to do this are very simple - something called a text editor, which is just a type-writer program, so, it lets you type stuff - and these simple, straight forward languages that even I have been able to master, to some extent, and a browser for trying what you've coded. The browser "runs" your application.

What you will discover is, if your application has more than a very few features, the code, what you've typed out, that's instructions to the browser, will become immensely cumbersome. Let's say something isn't quite working, or you want to add a feature. You will need to search a long scroll of completely inscrutable text, to find the particular part you need to modify, and then you will need to think, really hard, "what did this bit of code do, exactly? How do I work with it?" You might very well simply not be able to write an application with more than a few features.

More about that later. My friends who I hope will read my stuff are trying to get things done. When I come to them with ideas, saying, hey, you need these ideas to get things done, seeing as they are actually intelligent people, they want to know "where's the money?" I mean, they might not be quite that crass about it, and, too, being a bit idealistic in their habits of thought, they might say what they mean is "Tom, you're pushing all these ideas, but getting things done takes work, and we don't see you working very often. We're so busy working and actually doing stuff that we simply don't have time for a whole bunch of dreamy thoughts, not even your dreamy thoughts." Now, my friends may be a bit inclined towards dreaminess, but they aren't actually dumb, and they will acknowledge that, as sad as it is, there is some connection between getting things done and money. Even though it's nice if you can get things done by working really, really hard, even then, you might actually need some money, even just so you can do all that work. And then there's this: so it seems: if you want to get something bigger done, you need more money. Test out this reasoning: if the thing you want to do is so big that getting it done requires you to work 36 hours every day, well, you might as well forget it. But, if the thing requires more money, well, you might be able to get more money.

There's something interesting about thought experiments that I've discovered: they don't just confirm what you were thinking, they actually reveal things you hadn't thought of before. I've been conducting a kind of broad thought experiment in economics, for a number of years, and I just discovered something very interesting: the prosperity of cities - or any entity, such as a person, or a nation, or nature, or the whole world - depends completely on imports and exports. When I say  "completely" I don't mean that there aren't other factors - possibly, though here we enter the realm of paradox - but without imports and exports there is likely to be no economy. If there is such a thing as a completely self contained entity, it's a set of very special cases, and perhaps we out to study them. Really, though, the vast majority of entities clearly exist by being importers and exporters. This is actually simply fundamental. A completely self-contained entity that affects nothing and is affected by nothing would simply not exist, as far as we would know. The whole entire meaning of existence - of an entity's existence - is its interaction with the larger world. And this is fundamental, but it is also practical. A city will exist because it is an importer and an exporter ... of goods.

Without trying to lay out the complete logic of the proposition, we can say, as a kind of shorthand for the purpose of thinking, that our work serves this purpose: generating exports and imports. An export is something we produce that has value in the larger world. Now, conceivably, we could produce a very large amount of something that has a small value in the larger world, and greatly prosper by doing that, but we might encounter a hurdle, which is that producing a great deal of something might require a very large amount of work. One way to measure the amount of work done, or required to do something, is in hours. As previously stated, if creating a certain amount of value depends on more than a certain fixed, immutable number of hours a day, we're sunk! The key to creating more value for export is not more work, or harder work, either, because that, too, has a strict upper limit, it's creating more value per unit of effort. What it is is more intelligent effort. Now intelligence is not, as it may seem, some badge that a person wears, which indicates they are excellent. Intelligence is, very simply, information. This is why I so insist on working in media, finance, and technology, ergo my idiotic ramblings about the future of computing, fiction, the stock market.