Software

Software is a strange beast and yet now so ubiquitously endemic to our human world that we’ve all but become desensitised to its presence and its consequences, even as we struggle to manage dependencies, complexity, security and accelerating supercession.

What I think we might be misunderstanding is that software is, much like ourselves, a transmission medium for… something else – a collapsing wavefront of distributed abstractions, passing like ripples through our lives, through itself. The boundaries and ontological distinctions by which we define and describe our world, inverted.

The image in the mirror is the machine. I can only imagine, in faux metaphysical grasping, that the world looks much the same from the software’s perspective, if and when it finally acquires sentient ignition as experience.

I have supported software teams and seen how sophisticated this task is. We must only be a few years out from AI being the primary programmer but I imagine it’s coming. More interesting is that software like mind is simply a subset of something else, something indeterminately innumerable, indistinct and logically undecidable.

Once matter starts computing at sub-atomic scale, more than it already does, we are in for a surprise.