Integrated Software ~ Bouncy Determinism
In the Post-AI world, software must emulate nature. In nature, there are certain laws in play … be it the laws of physics, thermodynamics, bioenergetics, electromagnetics, etc. Going further, if certain conditions are met, a certain outcome happens. I could go as far as saying nature is “deterministic” but I want to be cautious, for the quantum world is heavy on the horizon and there is a lot at stake here.
Now, we can’t even predict the weather to perfection, but this has nothing to do with quantum mechanics, and it’s not that the weather is random. It is that, of course, we don’t know all of the conditions, the factors, physical or not, that lead to such an effect, the weather. So to us, such things like the weather is practically random. It might as well be random because we can’t predict it.
This is the kind of “determinism” nature seems to run on. The fine details may look random, but the arc is determined.
Software, for the longest time, by contrast, has encoded rules. Rules say if A, do B. They calcify. They have to anticipate every A, and they break the moment reality shifts, because rules go stale. A rules engine is, by definition, not integrated. It’s linear. One thing leads to another in a chain; a simple cause-and-effect flow. There’s no mesh, no field, no multi-dimensionality.
And this is why such software felt lifeless after a while. It has no essence underneath. Only logic on top. But AI is of course different.
The post-AI “markets” are taste, inspiration, quality, and integration, and these were the real markets all along.
The architecture of AI itself is an integrated system. It’s a spiderweb wherein the parts interact in ways that give way to emergent properties (“reasoning”, “intelligence”, “consciousness”, etc). It isn’t a chain of rules or hard-coded logic, and this is much closer to how nature seems to work.
Nature, for practical (non-quantum) purposes, appears somewhat random in the finest of details, but deterministic in overall structure, arc, and essence. AI is the same. The exact words it picks, the exact pixels, the exact timing, those vary. But the character, the pull, the arc, that can be held perfectly steady. The design problem of our time is to figure out how to encode the pull rather than the rule. To shape the gradient … not script the path.
The way this is currently done is by feeding the system enormous amounts of data. Text, image, video, audio, and more. The model builds its own sense of the world by absorbing the world in as many modalities as possible. The one thing it doesn’t really have is sensory data the human kind. Taste. Smell. Touch in the somatic sense. That’s the gap, and it’s a real gap, because those are the senses most directly tied to the body’s integration with nature. But on every other axis, the model is taking in more than any one human could in a lifetime.
Software, going forward, must play into this “bouncy determinism”, not by necessarily by bolting an LLM onto a rules engine, but by becoming integrated at its very architecture. Featureless, but immersive … and maybe a tad volatile (in a riveting sense) up close but cohesive from afar.
I don’t need any new software in my life and I don’t have new problems that software can solve. And I’m no longer inspired by software that helps me save a bit more time or money or stress. That stuff is saved enough. If I’m going to pay for software, it must help me transform, create, experiment, express, become the integrated human I know I can be.
The reality is we didn’t need most of traditional software anyway; it was largely an extension of the corporate world that is itself useless and anti-nature. And the mega-funded hyper-scaled technocrats have goaded you into becoming a databrain, when all you ever wanted to do with software was craft a story and make a movie.
Of course, you could have it your way. Nature’s logic is neither explicit nor linear. Rather, it’s emergent and asynchronous. And this is how software can be too. A system that holds an essence and lets you collide with it in ways neither of you fully predicted, the way a bird surprises you with the exact curve it takes while still, unmistakably, being a bird. It could really be like that.
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