AI is no Software
And brain cells are not thoughts
The Origin of Software and AI
AI is as much software as software was hardware in the form of a magnetic tape or disc 🙂 Software is understood as the code that runs on a computer. Instructions to take binary information from a keyboard or mouse and store it, or take it from storage to a screen. Moreover, manipulate the information based on rules that are defined in encoded instructions and then store it again or bring it back to a user. Neither the computer nor the software has any understanding of what they do, and they cannot give a reason why they do it. They don’t “work” autonomously and exclusively based on instructions. Neither the computer nor the software can be creative. Calling AI Software is like calling the early switches of an IMSAI 8080 software. No – the switches are still hardware. And that example is essential to understanding why AI is not software.
Of course, you still run AI Solutions with the help of software. That software is to AI like the switches of early computers, operating the machines.
Today, we have the same difficulty explaining AI as we did back in the 1960s when we were trying to explain the value of computer programs and make people understand that the PROGRAM is the magic, not the computer itself. It took years to make the leap from Software being just some fluff, and computer manufacturers will soon deliver it for free.
In any case, AI and Software started with mechanical approaches in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Both took very different paths. Software was easier, more straightforward, and focused on numbers and data, while AI was focused on intelligence. And that never changed.
Now – What is AI if it is not software
AI is a profoundly different technology and methodology to process information. It does it in a similar way to how we humans when we receive information. It’s no longer typing data in and requesting the same data in a different form. AI can CREATE new information, it can CREATE even new ideas (innovation), It can process Innovation without any human instruction, where the options of processing them may be thousands. Also, AI can create other AIs out of just thinking. AI can assess and value information, and decide the best way going forward WITHOUT getting instructions on how to do that. It can do that in 50 languages without getting a translator. Interestingly enough, it uses the same ‘code’ that our brain uses: language and relationships. Both together are a super potent mechanism.
Intelligent and adaptive flow, versus fixed process.
When you read this text, you immediately compose thoughts in your brain. You may reject the content as inaccurate, be sceptical, interested, excited, know more about it than I do, and craft additional concepts if the content was inspiring, or many other reactions. This happens while reading, and you compose thoughts with every line. Whatever you decide, you decide not based on the text I write (like the code of a computer) but on an enormously influential process called intelligence. If you would read this text, memorize it later on, and exactly repeat it as I wrote it, you would be a computer software. If you read it, compare it with your memory, compose thoughts, and instead of just repeating it, you bring all your expertise to it and tell somebody else, you can call it intelligent. You could even create completely new solutions that nobody ever thought about. That behavior we call intelligent.
AI is Intelligence
On top of a computer that runs the operating system, and a software called a browser, and a tiny piece of software that triggers an Interface to a GPT system, you get to Intelligence. Conventional software is simply speaking dumb – it is as intelligent as a piece of plastic. We only struggle explaining AI because something like that has never been created in our history.
AI Abilities
AI can think and find the best possible outcome. It can iterate through a million options, reasoning why it took this option over another based on all the information it has. And it has more information at hand than any human could ever store in their brain.
- It can create new things by following the same neuronal process that we humans do.
- It can complete tasks that are complex for us or simply annoying, repetitive tasks.
- It has already surpassed many of humans’ intellectual abilities.
None of these abilities can be created with software, just as the switches of an IMSAI 8080 could never instruct a CPU; it was the human to do that. Even a quantum computer on its own cannot become a superhuman giant; it needs software to operate, and then AI on top of the software to get crazy intelligent.
From Software to Artificial Intelligence
This was a long way. Software was still young, and so was AI. Both developed independently of each other. In 1962, Douglas Engelbart talked about the future of AI, which would be in Human Intelligence Augmentation. Software was a linear path to a predetermined outcome. That has never changed. AI took far longer, required far more resources, and needed significantly better technology and more powerful computers.
Software was a Neanderthal approach: primitive but robust. Eventually, they became extinct and made way for the more intelligent Humo Sapiens. And like we have some Neanderthal genes passed along, we will still have some traces of stiff, linear, and dumb software carrying forward. Will software go away? Not right now, but in the next 50 years, we will have traces of code in some QCs, yet nobody cares.
Is software dead?
Can conventional software like CRM or ERP be enhanced with AI and live longer? It would be like welding wings on a bus and hoping it can fly.
What Salesforce.com proposed in 2001 will become reality now, 25 years later: The end of software. It will become extinct in a process of natural progression. Are you still using floppy disks? Do you upload software from your tape recorder? 2025 is the year of the agents. And agents are the key to a new era of human workflows. Intelligent, helpful, supportive, fast, without being an expert. Skilled labor shortage? This term will vanish. What nature taught us is as essential as when we found out. Not the fastest or strongest win, but the most adaptive. Sharks survived five mass extinctions and have existed for over 400 million years*. Their secret is an exceptional ability to adapt.
Adapt
