Folks seem to habitually misrepresent the nature of modern software by focusing on a narrow slice of it. Google Maps is so much more than the pictures and text we touch and read on a screen.
Google Maps is the software. It is also the infrastructure running and delivering the software. It is the traffic sensors and cameras feeding it real-world input. Google Maps is also the continually shifting organization of brilliant human beings within Google focusing their own minds and each other’s minds on refining the software to better meet users’ needs and designers’ intentions. It is the click data collected and aggregated to inform changes based on usage patterns. It is the GIS data and the collective efforts and intentions of everybody who collects GIS data or plans the collection thereof. It is the user-generated locale content and the collective efforts of everyone contributing that data.
To think of modern distributed software as merely a tool is to compartmentalize in the extreme. It is more like a many-way continuously evolving conversation among those creating it, between those creating it and those using it, and among those using it - plus the “conversation” from all the sensors, cameras, robots, cars, drivers, planes, pilots, computers, programmers, and everything else feeding the system data, both real-time and slow-changing. Whether the total system is “an agent” seems like a meaningless distinction to me. The system is already a continually evolving sum of the collective, purposeful action of everybody and everything who creates and interacts with Google Maps.
And that’s just one web service among thousands in a world where the web services interact with each other, the companies and individuals behind them interact with each other, and so on. Arguing about the nature of the thingy on the phone or the monitor does not make any sense to me in light of the 100,000′ view of the whole system.
Folks seem to habitually misrepresent the nature of modern software by focusing on a narrow slice of it. Google Maps is so much more than the pictures and text we touch and read on a screen.
Google Maps is the software. It is also the infrastructure running and delivering the software. It is the traffic sensors and cameras feeding it real-world input. Google Maps is also the continually shifting organization of brilliant human beings within Google focusing their own minds and each other’s minds on refining the software to better meet users’ needs and designers’ intentions. It is the click data collected and aggregated to inform changes based on usage patterns. It is the GIS data and the collective efforts and intentions of everybody who collects GIS data or plans the collection thereof. It is the user-generated locale content and the collective efforts of everyone contributing that data.
To think of modern distributed software as merely a tool is to compartmentalize in the extreme. It is more like a many-way continuously evolving conversation among those creating it, between those creating it and those using it, and among those using it - plus the “conversation” from all the sensors, cameras, robots, cars, drivers, planes, pilots, computers, programmers, and everything else feeding the system data, both real-time and slow-changing. Whether the total system is “an agent” seems like a meaningless distinction to me. The system is already a continually evolving sum of the collective, purposeful action of everybody and everything who creates and interacts with Google Maps.
And that’s just one web service among thousands in a world where the web services interact with each other, the companies and individuals behind them interact with each other, and so on. Arguing about the nature of the thingy on the phone or the monitor does not make any sense to me in light of the 100,000′ view of the whole system.