Coding from Scratch
A Conversation with Virtual Reality Pioneer Jaron Lanier, Part One
What's wrong with the way we create software today?
I think the whole way we write and think about software is wrong. If you look at how things work right now, it's strange -- nobody -- and I mean nobody -- can really create big programs in a reliable way.
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Aren't bugs just a limitation of human minds?
No, no, they're not. What's the difference between a bug and a variation or an imperfection? If you think about it, if you make a small change to a program, it can result in an enormous change in what the program does. If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time. Certainly there wouldn't be any evolution or life. There's something about the way complexity builds up in nature so that if you have a small change, it results in sufficiently small results; it's possible to have incremental evolution. Right now, we have a little bit -- not total -- but a little bit of linearity in the connection between genotype and phenotype, if you want to speak in those terms. But in software, there's a chaotic relationship between the source code (the "genotype") and the observed effects of programs -- what you might call the "phenotype" of a program.
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we're at the point where computers can recognize similarities instead of perfect identities, which is essentially what pattern recognition is about. If we can move from perfection to similarity, then we can start to reexamine the way we build software. So instead of requiring protocol adherence in which each component has to be perfectly matched to other components down to the bit, we can begin to have similarity. Then a form of very graceful error tolerance, with a predictable overhead, becomes possible. The big bet I want to make as a computer scientist is that that's the secret missing ingredient that we need to create a new kind of software.
"Phenotropic" is the catchword I'm proposing for this new kind of software. "Pheno" refers to "phenotype," the outward appearance of something. "Tropic" means interaction. I first published the basic ideas in a book, The Next 50 Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century published in 2002 by Vintage Books and edited by John Brockman. In phenotropic computing, components of software would connect to each other through a gracefully error-tolerant means that's statistical and soft and fuzzy and based on pattern recognition in the way I've described.
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when you learn about computer science, you learn about the file as if it were an element of nature, like a photon. That's a dangerous mentality. Even if you really can't do anything about it, and you really can't practically write software without files right now, it's still important not to let your brain be bamboozled.
