Where are we going?

So much of what I like(d) about computers is how or why they worked. The algorithms were clever. The “why” of many things could be reasoned about and understood if you knew the deeper principles upon which everything else was built. I had faith that the unknowable parts were still knowable even if I didn’t always have the will to dig that deeply myself. I trusted that anything I might need to know someday could be found and mastered if truly necessary.

As time has gone on, though, that faith has been tested and now, perhaps, it is truly broken.

I don’t think anyone knows how anything works anymore. Not really. The scale exceeds human comprehension.

Oh sure - I can hear some people out there insisting they know and it’s just me that doesn’t. Some are probably insisting I actually do know and I’m being ridiculous to say what I just said.

I don’t think I believe either of you.

Does it matter though? It’s quite likely we will muddle along never wholly knowing how anything works again - but one might argue that this isn’t a new situation! After all, humanity doesn’t truly know how reality itself works and yet we deal with it and have been living with it for all of time.

We think we might know parts of it pretty well by now, but there does always seem to be a new surprise out there waiting to be discovered despite that.

But computers always felt intentionally different to me. I thought that the whole point was to make them knowable and predictable in spite of our unknowable universe. To be fair, that was both their curse and strength and I certainly cursed it many times.

Entropy, it seems, had other ideas.

Now it’s kind of a miracle any computer works at all. The number of failure points in even the most “basic” of systems are impossible to fathom and terrifying to enumerate. The security holes are many and distressingly pervasive. Error codes are hidden and ignored because they’ve lost all meaning even to the people they were written for.

Since we don’t know what else to do, we add abstractions and metaphors and sandboxes and layers. They grow and grow and soon are so far removed from reality that they themselves need new abstractions to make sense of them.

On it goes.

Surely this time we’ll find the right one.