THE SOFTWARE SOCIETY

Technology is a fundamental part of human history and a growing part of today’s human experience. Our daily lives and interactions with one another are so interwoven with technology that one can’t meaningfully discuss human society or economic development without incorporating the impact of technology. Technology has always been an important part of society’s evolution. Innovations in agriculture, transportation, and refrigeration improved our access to food and expanded our choices. Transportation improvements have changed our perception of distance and of how much of the world is available to us. The printing press made extensive retention and dissemination of knowledge possible. Telephones were an early expansion of human connections. The more recent digital revolution is apparent everywhere. It seems as if every product uses a digital processor—from alarm clocks to microwave ovens. Personal computers are by now an old trend; the new trend is wireless devices, particularly mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers, which in effect let us take a personal computer with us wherever we go. The next big thing is smart TVs, bringing the interactive access to entertainment and information we enjoy on PCs and mobile devices to our living rooms. And the connection of these devices to the Internet gives us access to the computing power and immense data resources on the Web. This digital trend will continue and accelerate. Every year, digital processors get more powerful and memory storage becomes more compact and less expensive. Access to the Internet, wired or wireless, will expand until it is available almost everywhere. The increased digital processing power in our houses, our offices, our mobile devices, and accessible through the Web has made possible another trend—increasingly intuitive interaction with digital systems. Companies continue to innovate with visual displays, touch screens, speech interaction, and gesture recognition. In many cases, such as web searches and voice “personal assistants,” the processing is done in the network on powerful “servers.” As the complexity and variety of the things we do with digital systems explodes, these intuitive “user interfaces” become increasingly important to help us take advantage of these new capabilities. Being connected to the Internet increasingly means being connected to our friends, family, and co-workers. Emailing, texting, tweeting, using social networks, as well as economical voice and video communications—all of them mean we can interact with others more flexibly and whenever we want. In developing countries, the growth of mobile phones has been phenomenal. People as well as digital devices are more connected. We see some of these trends in our lives every day. We don’t see as directly many of the areas where digital systems and software are impacting businesses and factories. Automation made possible by the increasing power of digital systems and the increasing power of software are making companies more productive, but, on the other hand, eliminating some jobs. The changes created by digital systems are accelerating. The exponential growth in the processing power and affordability of digital systems is one part of the story. The other part, and one emphasized in this book, is the mutability of systems that are driven by software. Software is in fact “soft”—it can be changed without changing the hardware. When software is changed, the hardware does things it didn’t do before. We often update the software on our PCs or buy new software. We download apps in minutes to our smartphones. We can buy and begin reading a new book in minutes if we have an eReader or tablet computer. The knowledge sources and services in the Web are updated constantly. This ability to change a hardware device by changing its software, with no intrinsic additional cost, accelerates the impact of digital advances on society. In effect, the combined impact of hardware advances and software mutability are changing society more quickly than has ever been possible before. The remarkably fast growth of smartphones and tablet computers is a clear example of this trend. Society is evolving through cultural evolution at a pace that makes genetic evolution almost irrelevant. We may feel that we have become accustomed to this pace. But there are times when an accelerating trend breaks through an invisible barrier and causes changes we don’t expect—some good and some bad. It’s a bit like a chain reaction—the impact can expand quickly, and, like a nuclear chain reaction, be destructive if not controlled. If controlled, it can generate a huge amount of useful energy. The accelerating change that software enables is supported by the other technology trends in digital systems and connectivity that we have noted. Software expansion has reached a point where its impact is central to the evolution of human society. Two major themes developed as I attempted to describe the impact of accelerated software evolution in this book. One is that we are getting increasingly connected to software, and that we can take advantage of that to couple computer intelligence and human intelligence. We can make computers and people more tightly tied together, with the tie always available to us and more intuitive, thus increasing the ability of individuals beyond that of our intrinsic humanity. We can expect to always have a communication channel with other people available, both for immediate and delayed interaction. Children growing up today will expect a continual level of connection to computers and each other that was only science fiction a few decades ago.