Talking about Star Trek, AI and the future of software.
In the Star Trek universe, the Changelings are an alien race famous for their shape-shifting abilities. They exist natively as a gel-like, copper-colored liquid, the Great Link. When needed, they hold the form of a person, an animal, an everyday object, even fire, and then slip back into the pool.
I think software is heading in that direction.
For decades, computing has forced human thought into static molds: windows, menus, file trees, monoliths like Microsoft Word. We bent our minds to fit the software, not the other way around.
Stop a minute and think about how your own mind works.
Visualize this word: Pasta.
Done? Now remember the flavor of what you ate last night.
Now imagine your best friend telling you a joke.
The brain doesn't have a single "universal" way of working. It is a set of ever-changing expressions of what you want in the moment: images, sounds, sensations, memories, all associating fluidly. Software was never meant to be this rigid, and for the first time it can start to bend toward the shape of the mind instead of the opposite.
If software can take any shape imaginable, why stay bound to generic tools built for the average user?
Generative models and code synthesis are what break the mold. Software no longer needs to be compiled once and shipped frozen to millions of identical screens. It can be ephemeral: scaffolded on the fly for a specific problem, mutated to your preferences, and dissolved when it has served its purpose. Interfaces generated just-in-time, programs written from a plain-language description, tools that rewrite themselves while you use them.
Picture running PowerPoint and telling it that you want (for some reason) everything to be pink. The software obeys and mutates. Personal software. Goodbye one-size-fits-all Microsoft Word? I don't know exactly how it will look, but I can say that I'm excited.
That excitement comes with a real tension. Can this liquid ocean of code run locally, on small and efficient hardware, with the data staying in your hands? Or does it trap us inside a centralized corporate monolith that burns enormous amounts of energy? The Changelings shape themselves; they don't rent their form from someone else. I'd like software to work the same way.
And what about operating systems? Everybody is running their heart's desire on their phone, tablet and laptop. Do people really care what's underneath? Do the people that sell it to use do?
I imagine software in the future as a massive ocean of consciousness. Everybody drinks from it. Everybody contributes.