| Summary: | What makes machine logic so difficult to understand for users ? It seems as if we attribute to machines the utopian potential of unifying all forms of logic into one single binary model. Yet, the transparency proposed by this utopian unification contradicts the actual technical situation of machines, revealing an existing tension between the material opacity of hardware and the utopian ideal of software. By reducing information to its bare minimum, machines would acquire infinite computational power. Heir to Turing’s theoretical universal machine, this utopian machine would be capable of everything and nothing. If computation can process everything, then the machine becomes truly universal by enabling a unified language embedded in electronic logic circuits. Program design is at the interface between machine logic and the production of functional programs. This essay explores the technical modalities of logic translations inherent to machines within the context of program design. We hypothesize that the successive layers of software, between a designer and the electronics, implies successive translations. This layering allows the machine to execute the program while simultaneously making it difficult for the end user to understand the machine-based logic, which would be equivalent to a noisy translation resulting in an unintelligible language. The logic of substituting one string (sequence of characters) for another string shares common traits with information encryption analysis, ergo cryptanalysis. While the analytical models are similar, the linguistic goals are quite different : from the machine standpoint, automated translation focuses on syntax, and from a human standpoint, it focuses particularly on semantics. This fundamental distinction contributes to a perception of machine logic opacity and makes it all the more difficult for the machine’s functioning to be understood. These processes reinforce the non-reversibility of translation : interdependence between layers, compilation, obfuscation, economic stakes, are all instances that seem to provide the basis of concealment of logic as technical dogma, favoring a functional ideology that paradoxically restricts the intelligibility of computational machines.
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