I really didn’t want to link two Verge posts in one day, but man, Nilay Patel’s The People Do Not Yearn for Automation (via Daring Fireball) is a near perfect essay that deserves your attention.
Also, what a great title for an essay!
Software brain is powerful stuff. 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.
Patel’s use of Software Brain as a concept reminds me of discovering literary theory in college while working on my English degree. It gave me a language, a way to think about reading, which unlocked new ideas in my mind. Patel’s defining of this thing as “Software Brain,” a thing I previously understood intuitively, is effectively doing the same thing as literary theory once did. Now, something I once felt, I am able to more clearly understand and talk about.
Software Brain is exactly how tech people understand the world. It’s the source of that disconnect between tech people and regular people. This concept is perfectly named and perfectly described by Nilay Patel.
I lean toward the written word, but the video essay version is also quite good.