Software brain is changing the world, but most people still aren’t buying.
I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea.
It’s an ask so big that I can’t imagine a reward that would make it worth it for anyone, even if the tech industry wasn’t constantly talking about how AI will eliminate all the jobs, require a wholesale rethinking of the social contract and — oops — also the latest models might cause catastrophic cybersecurity problems that might lead to the end of the world.
Does this sound like a good deal to you? Can you market your way out of this? This only makes sense if you have software brain — if your operative framework is to flatten everything into databases that you can control with structured language. The people paying thousands of dollars a month to set up swarms of OpenClaw agents and write thousands of lines of code are people who look at the world and see opportunities for automation, to repeat tasks, to collect data. To build software. AI is great for them. It’s even exciting in ways that I think are important and will probably change our relationship to computers forever.
For everyone else, AI is just a demanding slop monster. It’s a threat. I’m not saying regular people don’t use Excel or Airtable to plan their weddings or have fun throwing PowerPoint parties, or even that AI won’t be useful to regular people over time. I think a lot of people enjoy data and tracking different parts of their lives. I’m wearing a Whoop band as I write this. I’m just saying these things aren’t everything. Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.
And so the tech industry is rushing forward to put AI everywhere at enormous cost — energy, emissions, manufacturing capacity, the ability to buy RAM — and locked into the narrow framework of software brain without realizing they are also asking people to be fundamentally less human. They then sit around wondering why everyone hates them.
I don’t think a couple haircuts are going to fix it.
