Programs as works of art‽

Once upon a time I was reading one fantastic book, the names of which I don’t remember (and probably now I’ll distort the story a little). It was about a single civilization, which, on the verge of collapse, gathered strength and sent a capsule into space, in which all its greatest achievements and accomplishments, all their pride, their whole essence consisted. They found out about this, the pursuit of this capsule and the war for it began. When the winner reached its contents, he did not find there any scientific discoveries or technological miracles.

And I found a collection of fiction, paintings, music, movies, photo galleries of museums, etc. Plus a note that there was no point in putting scientific data into the capsule - any civilization will sooner or later come up with the Pythagorean theorem and the atomic reactor. But will she draw the same pictures, write the same music and make the same films? Surely not. Therefore, they are valuable, but all sorts of formulas and drawings are not.

Sometimes I wonder - but imagine that you need to assemble such a capsule today. And you and I were instructed to select a part of it - a certain amount of software (we are here to understand Habré, right?), Which by the above criteria could be placed in such a capsule. What to choose?
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It turns out that everything that Computer Science is so proud of - algorithms, data structures, all sorts of compression / encryption, operations on graphs and lists, parallelization and functional programming - is it all dust on the boots of progress? For a representative of another civilization, they do not carry any information - after all, that civilization either has already invented the same thing, or will definitely do it in the future. With such information, we can only mark our current level of development, but for that, a couple of kilobytes of text will suffice. Yes, and the meaning - to amuse your pride?

On the other hand, it turns out that such things, for example, as Angry Birds, an online casino or any social network (with all its content), is the place in this capsule. After all, it’s not at all the fact that another civilization will have birds with pigs, gambling or similar social needs / connections to ours. And these things will be interesting to them and will tell a lot about us.

And somehow I felt so sad because of this “a lot”. Not at noon, the 21st century will be seen by space guests, not by Werther's robot or Terminator, not even Skynet or the Matrix. They will see that which is ...

And we are not living in the Middle Ages - we also have computers and free will. We can write, like, whatever we want. But does this “everything we want” work of art turn out to be? Yes, there are many programs, and even worthy programs are many. We rejoice when the program works well. Here is Google Chrome - fast, convenient, safe. But can I relate to him as a fan listens to the music of his idol, as a connoisseur of painting looks at a painting in the Louvre, as the hall, frozen on a half-sigh, watches the actors play on stage? Hardly. There are good programs, but call them “art”? For what?

Maybe I'm just looking for the lyrics in physics, but it can’t be here by definition? Or are we now in the “increasing quantity” stage, and is the quality just waiting for us? Is there a black cat in this dark room?