Software Brain
It’s a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, the literal embodiment of software brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote the piece “Why software is eating the world” as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. But software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time.
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The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing things. So much of our lives run through databases, and a bunch of important companies have been built around maintaining those databases and providing access to them.
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Any business process that looks like code talking to a database in a repetitive way is up for grabs. That’s why Anthropic has been so relentlessly focused on enterprise customers, and it’s why OpenAI is now pivoting to business use. There’s real value in introducing AI to business, because so much of modern business is already software: collecting data, analyzing it, and taking action on it over and over again in a loop. Businesses also control their data, and they can demand that all their databases work together.
In this way, software brain has ruled the business world for a long time. AI has just made it easier than ever for more people to make more software than ever before — for every kind of business to automate big chunks of itself with software. It’s everywhere: the absolute cutting edge of advertising and marketing is automation with AI. It’s not being a creative.
Via John Gruber:
It’s up for debate what exactly is off and what should be done about it, but the undeniable proof that something is profoundly off is the deep unpopularity surrounding everything related to AI. You can’t argue that the public always turns against groundbreaking technology. The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. I’d say in both of those cases, regular people were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do.
Maybe the closest analog is social media, where people love to talk about how bad it is and yet continue right on using it. In both cases, there’s the sense that abstinence is not really an option because you’ll be left behind, and meanwhile the technology is providing real utility.
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The statement that you have to use AI or you’ll get left behind is not a mainstream position, it’s AI industry marketing that the tech lovers in our world have internalized. But people with a more balanced view of technology aren’t buying it and one of the reasons they’re so against AI is the very obvious fact it’s being forced on us against our desires
Hard disagree with Gruber’s take that the public is against AI yet still using it out of FOMO. I’d argue that AI services are currently being forced down onto every single aspect of software usage and that whether you like it or not, you’re forced to use AI features. It’s unavoidable not because of FOMO but because there’s little to no way around it.
"Being left behind" both in terms of AI and social networks is just a marketing tactic. In reality, there are some practical applications for both, but neither of these tools can currently justify the time, attention and money that are being poured into them by both individuals and companies on average.
Posts like this are about as social as my media has been for over a decade, and I’ve missed nothing.
AI is a little different but it’s too blanket of a term thrown around way too much.
'and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do.' - prolly because we've seen already how previous cases turned out. Pretty daft to expect this one to turn out differently (more extensive surveillance, more data mining, more crass monetisation etc).
'there’s the sense that abstinence is not really an option because you’ll be left behind' and so what.
