What Makes People Do What They Do?

This is not a question that keeps most people awake at night. Like sensible people, they just go to sleep - and go on with whatever they were doing, the next morning. The world they left behind, will still be the same the next day.

But there are still some people (such as me) who will persist in asking why - why does everything work this way? The basic answer, for thousands of years, has always been - supernatural beings make everything work the way it works. And this is still the default answer for most people.

But a few hundred years ago, Science arrived, with a different answer - there were scientific laws, expressed as mathematical equations, that described how things worked. And these laws could be used to give people control over their world - to make them more powerful, and to make them rich!

This was immediately put to use by the Industrial Revolution - that devised many machines, that could use the power of fossil fuels, initially Coal, but later Oil.

And this made some people rich - but the rest, poor - and very poor. There had always been poor people, but this was a new kind of urban poverty, that was appalling. Clearly, something had gone wrong - but what?

People had devised a new ideology, that was called by many names - none of the very flattering to the society that devised them. This new ideology gave too much control, to the wrong kind of people.

This was easy enough to see, and most people agreed with it - but they could not agree on how to solve this problem. They knew something other than people had to be in control - and they could not betray this fundamental belief.

The Enlightenment had an answer - the rule of Reason. But this was quickly overruled by Passions, that were much more powerful. As shown by the French Revolution, that destroyed an entire nation.

This brings us up to the end of the 19th Century - and WWI, the Depression, WWII, and the Cold War. What was in control here? Whatever it was, it was not very nice - even though people tried their very best to make it look that way.

This is when I came on the scene, as an Electronic Engineer (U of Illinois, 1959).  I could make no sense of what was going on - but no one else could either. We just kept on making money from the Cold War, that was bankrupting the USSR.

Then the Vacuum Tube became obsolete, and I was out of a job. So I moved to where the money was - in Computers. This made sense, at the time, because I had a technical background, and I could write - so I became a Tech Writer, in high-tech California.

I had walked into a minefield, and was lucky to be able to retire on my Social Security pension - in 2001, in Costa Rica. Here I can sit, in my pajamas, and my laptop, with a fast Internet - and watch the craziness going on back in the States.

This includes the Bits Newsletter from the NY Times. You might want to subscribe to it, for yourself.

Computer Science is a new kind of Science, that works entirely differently - using a different kind of mathematics, called algorithms. That most people cannot comprehend.