Software with a Soul

It was my usual Thursday morning, and I was thinking what to write next. There was the option of talking about Glean, a startup with another round of funding to break — this time for sure — into the market of enterprise search powered by AI. Does anyone read about past companies and their efforts?

Or another option was to write about Intel and its slow demise. This company had such a monopolistic advantage (Wintel), at one time, it was unthinkable Intel could fail. A recurrent pattern which will meet all the current (monopolistic) players in the tech industry with or without government intervention.

But then, I received a newsletter from NFX, a 'venture firm exclusively focused on pre-seed & seed stage startups.'

The title of the newsletter was 'Software with a Soul: AI’s Underestimated Frontier'. I had to read the post several times. The content set a new level of lunacy, and, using the words of Marvin — 'It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level.'

First, we started talking about ‘smart’ devices. Then we moved to artificial intelligence. Then came the almost imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence, which Wikipedia warns us is 'not to be confused with generative artificial intelligence’ or ‘artificial superintelligence.’ The people at NFX moved the needle again.

The Software with a Soul post now joins the pantheon of human lunacy, which I described in my past newsletters about how HR got a bad infection from AI and the Stoned AI Philosopher.

What do we learn from this gem of futuristic thinking?

We learn that when generative AI gained mainstream traction, 'The software exhibited a degree of humanness – a quality that is vastly underestimated in both founder and investor circles.' Why? Because after 'it wrote poetry about your dog or drew a picture of a llama playing basketball' it suddenly 'was something more.'

The post also said, 'AI isn’t just amazing because it’s smart and efficient – it’s amazing because it can make humans feel things.'

And because of that (and many other things) 'we’re heading toward a new paradigm for AI, and computing in general. We call it “Software with a Soul.”'

As you can imagine, the author created a new abbreviation for Software with a Soul - SwaS. ‘SwaS are products 'where “humanness” is the core value proposition. It’s delightful, intuitive, empathic, helpful, but also stochastic if it needs to be.'

The rest of the article follows the same pattern with nonsense in every single sentence.

The post includes lots of meaningless fluff, but, on occasion, it goes to specifics. We learn that 'there will be an emergence of a class of AI for which humanness is the core value proposition.' and the breakdown will be into the following three categories: ‘anonymous automation,’ ‘humanness is the last mile’ and ‘humanness is the product.’

Of course by now, if you managed to read this far, you wonder why all this? The answer is simple: 'The opportunity: scaling humanity. AI is driving the marginal cost of humanness to zero.' and because they are VCs, they see the new markets where they ‘expect Software with a Soul to resonate with customers anywhere the supply of humanness is scarce.'

But not all is just tech and a bright future. The author poses an important question. 'Does this mean we’re not special anymore?' 

The answer: 'We can all agree that if there were infinite humans in the world who could fill those gaps, that would be ideal. But that’s not reality.'

Finally to tie all this together with wisdom to ponder on, the author declares that 'social animals need social machines.'

Yes, it is time to finish this. The sad part is that at the end of the post, the author, a partner at a VC firm, is thanking five other people for their input and feedback — and none of them questioned the sanity of this!

The recurrent pattern? Whatever we build and declare as an Artificial Utmost Total Supreme Intelligence will pale in comparison with Human Stupidity. And because of that, any AI will have an easy task taking over the world — which is what this news network predicted 16 years ago with high accuracy.