(image Edge.org) A month or so ago I had the pleasure of sitting down with Valley legend Marc Andreessen, in the main for the purpose of an interview for my slowly-developing-but-still-moving-forward book. At that point, I had not begun re-reading David Gelernter’s 1991 classic Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean
Man, I wish I had, because I could have asked Marc if it was his life-goal to turn David’s predictions into reality. Marc is well known for many things, but his recent mantra that “Software Is Eating the World” (Wall St. Journal paid link, more recent overview here) has become nearly everyone’s favorite Go-To Big Valley Trend. And for good reason – the idea seductively resonates on many different levels, and forms the backbone of not just Andreessen’s investment thesis, but of much of the current foment in our startup-driven industry.
A bit of background: Andreessen’s core argument is that nearly every industry in the world is being driven by or turned into software in one way or another. In some places, this process is deeply underway: The entertainment business is almost all software now, for example, and the attendant disruption has created extraordinary value for savvy investors in companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple. Further, Marc points out that the largest company in direct marketing these days is a software company: Google. His thesis extends to transportation (think Uber but also FedEx, which runs on software), retail (besides Amazon, Walmart is a data machine), healthcare (huge data opportunity, as yet unrealized), energy (same), and even defense. From his Journal article:
The modern combat soldier is embedded in a web of software that provides intelligence, communications, logistics and weapons guidance. Software-powered drones launch airstrikes without putting human pilots at risk. Intelligence agencies do large-scale data mining with software to uncover and track potential terrorist plots.
That quote reminds me of Wired’s first cover story, in 1993, about the future of war. But in 1991, two years before even that watershed moment (well, for me anyway), Yale scholar Gelernter published Mirror Worlds, and in it he predicted that we’d be putting the entire “universe in a shoebox” via software. Early in the book, Gelernter posits the concept of the Mirror World, which might best be described as a more benign version of The Matrix, specific to any given task, place, or institution. He lays out how such worlds will come to be, and declares that the technology already exists for such worlds to be created. “The software revolution hasn’t begun yet; but it will soon,” he promises.
As we become infinite shadows of data, I sense Gelernter is right, and VCs like Andreessen and the entrepreneurs they are backing are leading the charge. I’ll be reviewing Mirror Worlds later in the summer – I’m spending time with Gelernter at this home in New Haven next month – but for now, I wanted to just note how far we’ve come, and invite all of you, if you are fans of his work, to help me ask Gelernter intelligent questions about how his original thesis has morphed in two decades.
It seems to me that if true “mirror worlds” are going to emerge, the first step will have to be “software eating the world” – IE, we’ll have to infect our entire physical realities with software, such that those realities emanate with real time and useful data. That seems to be happening apace. And the implications of how we go about architecting such systems are massive.
One of my favorite passages from Mirror Worlds, for what it’s worth:
The intellectual content, the social implications of these software gizmos make them far too important to be left in the hands of the computer sciencearchy…..Public policy will be forced to come to grips with the implications. So will every thinking person: A software revolution will change the way society’s business is conducted, and it will change the intellectual landscape.
Indeed!