No Silver Bullet Revisited

Five year old article by BradCox, at

http://www.virtualschool.edu/cox/pub/NoSilverBulletRevisted/

A critique of Brooks' NoSilverBullet article, arguing that there is in fact a SilverBullet in store for information technology, and predicting that it will consist of a paradigm shift, toward software mimicking some important properties of "stuffware", a.k.a. material properties.

IMHO, just plain irremediably wrong. BradCox posits that "what's wrong with software" is precisely that which, to a lot of people, is the defining property of software - you can give it away and still own it; in other words, that there is no "law of conservation of information" analogous to the conservation of mass, and that we should invent one.

Worse, BradCox arrives at this conclusion from the notion that the commercial exchange transaction is what made manufacturing of tangible goods such an efficient process. In other words, we have efficient ways to make burgers, or pencils, or cars, only because these objects can be bought and sold; Brad's corollary is that we don't have an efficient way to make software artefacts because "ownership" of software is a fuzzy concept.

The assertion can be disputed (the "commercial exchange transaction" has been around for millennia; burger-, car- or pencil-capable complex manufacturing processes are a century old) but the corollary is in fact an absolutely unsupported inference.

Some NanoTechnology proponents suggest that if a SilverBullet is to be found, it is diametrally opposite to the one Brad suggests; nanotech is expected to make the "commercial exchange transaction" irrelevant to the manufacturing of goods, and to make it clear that conservation of mass is also irrelevant. Load the appropriate burger, pencil or car software into your NanoForge?, provide the machine with appropriate amounts of the requisite raw material (plain ol' atoms), go for coffee, come back to collect burger, pencil, or car as appropriate. Look up the words "commerce", "transaction", and "economy" in the etymology dictionaries and history books for a laugh from time to time.

Two wrongs do not make a right. Stuffware is unpleasant enough to deal with, because of this nasty property that it can't be easily duplicated, and therefore requires an absurd apparatus we call "economy" just so people can eat, write, or move around; all to deleterious effects, such as endemic obesity, deforestation, and pollution. I find it shocking that anyone could seriously assert that software, which has the really nice property that it costs nothing to give away, should be lumbered with the evils of stuffware.

As in the old saw which has Marylin Monroe wanting a child of Albert Einstein : "Such a fantastic gift, my looks and your brain !", and the reply "My dear, what if it turns out to be the reverse ?"

Note that this is, after all, an old article - middle-aged in Internet years ! Brad, would you still write the same article, today ?

I most certainly would. In fact, I can't find enough substance in your comments to react them to here, just the kind of heated rhetoric and proofs by assertion that don't warrant a response. For what I really think, see http://virtualschool.edu/mybank -- BradCox

Yay Brad. I read it the same way - makes little sense.

I dunno. It's mostly incomprehensible, but the NanoTechnology point makes some sense. I mean, wasn't that supposed to be the ultimate? Garbage In, Stuff Out? --TaralDragon