The goal of programming is to replace humans and other beasts of burden with machines. The humans will not go into the abyss. It is not known whether the processor reads the program, or the program tells the processor what to do, but since most of it is imaginary (or virtual), it doesn't matter. Normally people say that the processor is running, but this is actually not true. A processor just sits there and intentionally gives programmers errors until they asplode. Most processors use lots of electricity just to sit giving out errors at random. Nowadays processors can do this a lot more often, and optimising the idle time can get gains of more than 100%.