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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 AIs. That’s
what we don’t want to happen, because the AIs 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.

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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?

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