When Everything Is Software

I’m currently enjoying Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near. I’m only about half-way through it, and despite some inital scepticism I find his data more than a little convincing.

In the future Kurzweil sets out, everything will be a form of information. The bodies we inhabit and the world we interact with will be dynamically created by billions of nanobots controlled by powerful computers and strong A.I. This led me to a thought: In the future, everything will be software. Your house. Your coffee. Your brain. All software.

Scary, no? I don’t know if I wholly believe Kurzweil yet, but the next few decades — his timeline for the appearance of the singularity — might be a very interesting time to be a software developer.