I’m writing a more comprehensive essay on the role software is playing in society. This post is a set of highly disconnected points I want to make in that essay.

  • Inherently software is an infinitely moldable, interactive, and updateable object.
  • Software is plastic. It has an infinite creative space, and will soon become everything. When that happens, it will also become invisible.
  • AI helps software create patterns - patterns that help us see, hear, and create.
  • People who make software need to deeply understand the spoken and unspoken needs of the people.
  • People who make software must accept both the first and second order effects of what they are creating, especially given how easy it is to distribute and get people’s attention.
  • Software is eating the world - first by modelling it, then by creating something that only exist only in software. This is a consistent pattern that applies in many scenarios and industries.
  • Software is becoming closer to us. We are already wearing software, driving software, and living in software.
  • Software is starting to solve some higher order human functions - we learn, meditate, and empathize with software. But we don’t have software-native ways to do those things, yet.
  • What happens when software has finished eating the world? What do we have to watch out for? Technologists love to extrapolate potential but software’s place in society will likely be more balanced and neutral.

I’ll be updating this post as I structure these thoughts further.