The Software of the Future, or the Model Precedes the Real
Alan N. Shapiro · transcript Verlag eBooks · 2024
Archive, and the Institute for Time-Based Media at the Department of Design of the Berlin University of the Arts here in Berlin, Germany for inviting me to speak about my work in "future design," specifically my work on the Software of the Future.My methodology is transdisciplinary.Trans-disciplinarity is not the same thing as interdisciplinarity.I think that interdisciplinarity by itself is insufficient, because interdisciplinarity implies that what is required to move knowledge forward is dialogue and cooperation among the existing disciplines or academic-scientific fields of knowledge.I think that knowledge from different disciplines should first be brought together, and then a project of deep rethinking of everything should take place, leading, among other things, to a new classification system of knowledge.When this rethinking happens, then the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts.We will get to knowledge beyond what we would achieve by combining the knowledge of different fields in an additive way: in algebra f(x + y) = f(x) + f(y), or in number theory f(ab) = f(a) + f(b).As part of this rethinking towards a new classification system of knowledge, I propose the project of observing and participating in the active transformation of software: devising a new curriculum for informatics-a "right-brain informatics" that builds on existing computer science yet moves it closer to art, sociology, philosophy, and cultural theory.Based on a genealogy of successive programming languages -machine languages, procedural languages, object-oriented (OO) languages -I extrapolate and perceive the appearance of the Software of the Future.The project is essentially that of "transforming computer science into a humanities subject."Despite its name, computer science is so far only an engineering discipline. The Model Precedes the RealWhat I mean by "the model precedes the real" is that object-oriented programming languages are modelling or simulation languages, and the more radicalized "object lan-