Charlie Stross is an author (and occasional poster here) who has a series collectively known as “The Laundry Files” in which magic can be performed by computers as well as by humans, by having the computers perform specific calculations.
And also the Laundry Files where computation is magic (and also thins the walls of reality and allows the horrors that chitter behind to, well, not be behind it).
You might enjoy the Magic 2.0 book series. A bunch of programmers independently discover that the world is a simulation so they give them selves magic powers and time travel to medieval England to be wizards.
Haha yes, many have laid the link between magic and computers/programming. I remember as a child being very interested in magic and that fascination naturally refocussed to computers in my adult life.
Also check out this website for a funny parable about computers, DNS, wizards and the NSA:
http://grimoire.computer/
Technology in general and software in particular. Magic is affecting the world through words. This is what we do, we weave our spells of C, Ruby, shell or whatever and ... Things Happen.
Of course, most of the time nothing much happens, but that's par for the course :-)
We are highly focused on software that automates and/or makes parts of Magic and Magic+ more efficient. Most of the founding team are engineers, including myself. At this time we can't say much about our specific technical approach, other than that it is a very difficult problem, we have a novel approach, and we are making progress.
Interesting that the video uses space alien technology as a name for magic. Just look at that magic, cosmic powder, as it's sprinkled on the teddybear. Is it a coincidence that in Land of Lisp, space aliens help humans, and in SICM, the programmer is a wizard?
Have you actually used Magic? I'm a reporter for a new startup Tech.pro and am writing a story about Magic. Looking for users. Please let me know! Thanks!
Magic | San Francisco, CA | Full-time | Full-stack | Engineering
Magic (http://getmagic.com) is a Y-Combinator and Sequoia-backed software company in San Francisco, CA that is building a hyper-intelligent, ubiquitous assistant available over SMS, email, chat apps, and other digital channels. Magic is a simple idea with endless potential - one phone number that you can send a text message to 24/7 and get anything you want, whenever you want it. Food, flowers, plane tickets, reservations, electronics, you name it. We fulfill these requests magically for our users by being a common interface to a growing network of national and international service providers. Most of our users use us on a regular basis to make their lives easier and to be more productive, but of course, we fulfill our share of crazy requests: meeting celebrities, skywriting, 1,000 gallons of seawater, helicopters, motorcycles...
But all of this is just the beginning. Magic is a command line interface to the world; it is an API for everything. You can’t "sudo cancel my Comcast subscription" but you can "magic cancel my Comcast subscription." It’s a unified plaintext interface that sits as a layer of abstraction over the set of all possible products, services, and actions. It’s the Star Trek computer. It’s your companion and your friend.
Magic was founded in 2015 by a team of software engineers with one simple premise: create a natural language interface to the complexity of the world, delivered by a combination of artificial intelligence and human expertise. We are hardcore developers at heart, we are highly iterative, and we are relentless. We are minimal and focused on writing code that really matters. We don't stop until we are done.
Our primary technologies right now are Node.js, Meteor, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, AWS, Docker, Ansible. Experience with these are very nice but not required. We believe in using the right tool for the job.
We are currently hiring for senior and mid-level engineering positions. This is a full-stack, generalist role for which you will be given a high degree of autonomy and will be expected to deploy impactful code to production in your first week. We're less concerned with your resume and more concerned with your ability to get real stuff done.
Come build the future of human-computer interaction with us.
Bonus points if you've got...
- Experience working with Node.js, Meteor, modern web application frameworks
- Experience with devops, the AWS suite, Docker, Ansible, Jenkins
- Experience within early-stage startups or human operations companies
reply