About MachineGods
Why "MachineGods"?
I chose the name machinegods.com to express the concept of people understanding and using machines better.
The concept of "machine gods" as I envision it here refers to those of us who seek mastery over machines, especially with regards to computational machines.
There are two fundamental aspects to this concept - one social, and one technical:
- To employ machines to accomplish some goal
- To have sufficient understanding and ability to be able to create and manipulate machines as desired
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to advance some form of humanism here. I'm not suggesting that we take ourselves and make ourselves Gods. Nor am I really intending to make any type of religious statement with this name or concept, though the topics here would certainly relate to ideals such as the Golden Rule.
I found the closing comments of "Secure Communication: The Technology Of Freedom" by Ashish Gulhati to be thought provoking in the social context of the first aspect (it also helped with the idea for the site name). I highly recommend reading the full article, and really the entire Beautiful Code book.
"I think that as the weavers of code, it is to a large extent the ethical responsibility of programmers to seek not only that our code be beautiful in its design and implementation, but also that it be beautiful in its results, in a larger social context....
... and can finally set people across the world free to communicate and trade in privacy and liberty.
Actualizing this global, mathematically protected open society is largely up to us, the gods of the machine."
Gulhati, Ashish, "Secure Communication: The Technology Of Freedom", Beautiful Code (O'Reilly, 2007)
This article communicates very well that our skills and abilities are only of value when employed to meet someone's need. We can certainly pursue various ideas simply because they're intellectually stimulating, but ultimately if we aren't helping our neighbors, then it's pointless.
The second aspect of the machine gods concept refers to technical mastery.
A machine god, in my mind, is one who is able to take a raw piece of computing hardware (be it physical or virtual), and cause it to do whatever work you desire without intervention from anyone else or their tools. They are the ones who can truly say “I create and control in this domain according to my will.”
That's not a level of mastery that the average system administrator requires to be able to do their job well. However, working to acquire that level of mastery is a very challenging journey, with definite rewards on the job. It's the level of mastery I would like to be able to say I have achieved.
