A Thoughtful Apparatus
I work as a software engineer. It’s a pretty swank gig. I get paid to build ideas.
Building, of course, has traditionally been a physical enterprise. If I suddenly time-shifted into an English-speaking village at the turn of the ninth century and tried to convince a passing gentleperson I build ideas for a living, I’d have a hard time of it. It wouldn’t just be because I can’t speak Old English, or because my entrance from a crackling rip in the time continuum might inspire fear, or that in their fear they’d probably err on the safe side and run me through with some pointy sort of pole. No, even if these impediments were surmounted, the word build comes from Old English “byldan“, which meant “to construct a house”. Building, to those folks, was a physical endeavor, and according to my sources (The Complete & Unabridged Gut Reference—Stomach Edition) this continues to be the natural connotation. The idea of building an idea is all sorts of weird.
The mathematicians, of course, have been “constructing” proofs for a while now, but those people have always been a little odd. And, frankly, suspicious. Could they actually show you what they have built? Not a representation of it, but the thing itself? No. In fact, based on the physical evidence, mathematics is an international campaign to invent exotic symbols and exhaust our crucial reserves of chalk. Stick a mathematician at the business end of a pointy pole and I doubt he could produce any tangible evidence to the contrary.
Ignore your Dictionary, I’m Trying to Make a Point
To be fair to the mathematicians, which I do only begrudgingly, the modern meaning of build covers the more general activity of “combining materials or parts”—a definition not limited to physical objects, much less to houses in particular.
But for the sake of argument, let’s restrict ourselves to the physical connotations of building. Let’s think of building as an action with a physical result, like a chair or a clock. Let’s say that mathematicians who say they build things are big fat liars, both because it’s fun to call mathematicians names and because it is convenient for my point.
Take That, Dixie
What then of the philosophers? The poets? The wordmongers of all kinds? None of them are making anything physical either. Like the mathematicians, they mostly just get to push symbols around, and that’s about as physical as it gets. Instead of integrals and square root signs, writers get to string together an alphabet. We’re delighted by the best writers because they can take these clumsy symbols and hit their mark anyway. It’s like watching a strange kind of caber toss where the player is aiming to land his tree trunk on a dixie cup from fifty paces. Not many people can aim a caber like that; when someone goes and nails it, we cheer. Or, you know, weep, depending on if we’re rooting for the dixie cup.
Caber skills aside, does a string of letters count as an idea? An actual, physical idea? Or is it just a stand-in? A frozen echo of a living idea? Even the best poet could never build a poem that so squarely hits the mark of a “stone” in the way that, well, in the way that a stone does just by being itself. Forgive the irony here.
So where do I get off claiming I build actual, physical ideas? It’s enough to inspire suspicion from the most generous of sensible persons. But it’s true. And it’s what makes computers so damn cool.
Enter the Engineer
An engineer is one who “designs and builds a machine or structure”. In other words, an engineer not only generates ideas, she also translates those ideas into a real, physical form.
The engineer’s got kin, of course. Carpenters and sculptors, musicians and athletes. All the folks that skip words and symbols in favor of objects and actions. It’s an approach that is very raw and very satisfying. A poet, for example, may think about a chair and then turn his ideas into words. A carpenter, in contrast, may also think about a chair. But the carpenter turns his ideas into a chair.
Wow.
Okay, so the carpenter can build his idea, when his idea is a chair. What about when his idea isn’t a chair?
Enter the Computer
The day the computer was born, an entire class of ideas was given a medium: electricity. It had been around before, but there was no way to control it. There was no electron chisel.
Well, the computer is the electron chisel. And as raw materials go, electrons are wicked cool. They’re abundant. They’re versatile. They’re the stuff dreams are made of.
Literally.
Thought-in-a-box
For my money, the stuff that gets built inside a computer is as close as you can get to constructing a machine made of thought. The next time you watch a geek bent over a keyboard, imagine what idea they might be building in there. The sorting algorithms, the matrix decompositions, the 3D drawing routines and the network protocols…each is meticulously sculpted from the electrons in the box, wound with a special key and set to its task over and over again. It’s the power of thought, unleashed in physical form. It’s why I love my job. Thoughts once trapped in abstraction can now be wrapped in silicon: vibrating the air, filling cities with light, balancing satellites above the sky, and racing over the earth, humanity’s stories in tow.