The Babylonian Ghost in Your Machine Long before the first transistor was etched into silicon, humanity was already grappling with the fundamental nature of information. The persistent categorical error of our age is the belief that computation began with the microchip. In reality, the ancient Babylonians’ greatest innovation was not a physical tool, but a data structure: the place-value number system. To appreciate the profundity of this, one must only look at the alternative. In the additive system of Roman numerals, representing the average distance to the moon requires a cumbersome string of symbols hundreds of characters long. Attempting to record the distance to the sun would require nearly 100,000 symbols—a single number filling a 50-page book. For the ancients, such quantities were "unspeakable"—not merely large, but impossible to manipulate or even mentally inhabit. By inventing a more efficient way to represent information, the Babylonians did not merely simplify ac...
