So Basically...

The following insights are taken from a discussion in my English Novel class.

In discussing the interrelatedness of print and the digital world: print comes into being through the output of algorithms in a machine's programming that can be broken down into layers. The first is the actual program itself, running smoothly to produce letters on a page that we can see. That program is cloaked in and made up of assembler languages that are in turn made up of electronic pulses (i.e. binary) at their simplest level. (Disclaimer: this is all explained to me by my ENGLISH professor. So I apologize if this dramatic simplification makes any of my more programming-savvy readers cringe a little)

He also drew a connection between those electronic pulses that make up the basis of artificial intelligence and the human brain. Because, once you dig down past all the emotional filters, hormone processing, and cellular specialization, the brain and nervous system essentially run on synapses, or electronic pulses, which turn on and off in patterns that our brain, through its many layers, translates into data input that we can derive meaning from.

So humans and computers aren't so different after all. And obviously, computers are doing a lot of things that we simply don't understand before they get their information to us. All those little programs, running frantically around gathering up the data they need before sending it to the surface to appear as words or images that we understand.

In the meantime, we users are sitting patiently at our computer screens as these programs do who-knows-what in their quest to obtain the information we seek.

Now, we all know I'm a bit of a nerd, so this shouldn't surprise you, but all this talk of personified programs and user-program input-output just distracted me from the point of the lesson (which I still don't really remember) with one simple conclusion:

Basically, we're in Tron.

Cool! Can I have my light bike now?