POLLACK: It's an organizational principle and a scale of complexity which dwarfs software engineering. Vitae is not an ingredient that anybody is really looking for. We work on a basic biological question in my lab, which is, "How can a system dissipate energy and create more and more informational structure? How can a computer program write itself simply by wasting computer time?" In some sense it's a computational thermodynamic approach to artificial life, as opposed to a purely software-engineering approach to life. When we get to 10B lines of code, we will know if we succeed or fail.

The traditional notion, the high church computation, the separation of the brain as hardware and the mind as software, is influential but it's ultimately wrong because the computational metaphor of serial programs operating on discrete data structures doesn't really capture the richness of natural systems. To return to your earlier question, our traditional Von Neumann notion is just not rich enough to capture what's going on in the natural world. I'm not saying that the world is Penroseian, post-Turing, or that there's magical soul-power there, just that we must drastically expand the notion of how information is represented beyond traditional symbolic computing which is based on flexible lists and logical forms. Semantics is more than syntax with Capital Letters.

We've been looking at chaotic systems, fractals, dynamical systems, both the attractors and the transients, all of which are very different than the traditional data structure plus algorithm that we've studied in computer science. I still think its computation; everything in nature is fundamentally the interaction between energy and matter and information. The question is: What is that interaction? What are the principles which guide the dynamic evolution of the system? It's not simply a program, some data structures and some polynomial time algorithms. While it's right to think of things in terms of computation, the ideas we've brought to it have been very impoverished compared to what's actually happening in natural systems, and that's really what I've been studying. What is God's cookbook that enables compositions of things to have new and surprising behaviors everywhere in the universe? Why does hydrogen and oxygen combine into something with a long liquid phase and such odd freezing properties? Random mixtures of organic chemicals are dense with behavioral possibilities, while random strings of machine code are 99.9% useless.

EDGE: On one level, software is a machine, a virtual machine. It has physicality. This is the software you buy shrink-wrapped off the shelf or download from the Internet onto your computer. Let's call this 'software machinery.' On a deeper level, our civilization has made a phase transition, the result of which is a new and as yet unnamed state. We might loosely call it software, but it is deeper, broader, more fundamental. In a physical phase transition — from a solid, say, to a liquid to a gas — molecular content remains the same but the relations among molecules change, as when water takes on a radically different form when it boils off into a gas. We've entered a new state of civilization, and software, the 'engine' of this phase transition, becomes its philosophical essence in the deepest ontological sense."

POLLACK: Software is the embodiment of design, and its been stripped out of the physical manifestion of design. This is going to change traditional industries. Imagine Ford Motor Co losing its factories and being an intellectual property company, developing and licensing their blueprints to the most cost-effective factories. The best car companies will have the most creative humans using the best CAD. Then, like the video game industry, groups of engineers will spin off into little startup car companies so they get a piece of equity in their own creativity.

We could say that traditional notions like the patent system are really places where you could study this transition most effectively. A wheel is a piece of hardware. It's this thing, and we've lathed it, and it's round, and it rolls and it carries a weight. But there's a piece of software which says that "for every i from 1 to 360 plot r and theta, being the angle," and in software you've created a wheel! Now traditionally the patent office has rejected algorithm as something that was of nature, something that was of God and therefore unpatentable, but over the past decade and a half or so, we've allowed the patenting of software. We've even allowed the patenting of a business idea. If the current situation applied 40 years ago when Amway was formed, it could have gotten a patent on the idea of hierarchical multi-level, pyramid scheme marketing, as opposed to the original Ponzi scheme of pyramid scheme investing.

Software is language, and we copyright it; it's all language that describes how a machine is going to work, all the way down to the lowest level of detail. And what a computer, a compiler, or an interpreter for programming languages does is to make our piece of text come alive, and the machine actually operates exactly the way the piece of text describes! So instead of just being a description of the points that form a circle, a computer can take that description and turn it into a virtual simulated wheel inside of a virtual environment. Software is a solvent melting the boundary between what is virtual and what is real, between text and invention.

Some of the excitement over my lab's conception of automatically designed robots was the idea that we made a transition from the virtual world back to the real. Software itself made inventions inside a computer that, in another age, could be patented. We could have patented a triangle, a ratchet, or a breast stroke before people were swimming that way, and then turned that from a software idea in a virtual world into a real piece of hardware that embodied that principle. The end of that boundary between text and invention is something that profoundly affects society and the academy.

I'm working in my university to alert the faculty to what software means to its traditional arrangement in which researchers keep their books while the university gets their patents. What does it actually mean now, when I could write a piece of text using an editor, which then becomes a patentable piece of software? Is it mine or is it the University's? We're all fighting about that, either for software or courseware. My proposal is to end the patent policy and tithe the university 9% of all our IP equity it incubated.

Not only has software destroyed the text/invention distinction, software destroys the boundaries of what we used to own versus rent. We used to buy a book and could own that book or we could own a recording. Property itself is being redefined in the information age.

The book was really three different things fused into one. One part was the words, the information content; the second part was the medium, the physical delivery mechanism, the paper and the ink that captured the words; and the third part was a social and legal contract, the license that said you may buy this book, and after you read it you could keep it in your library, or pass it to a friend, or sell it in a garage sale. But you can't make more copies to sell. Those three components, the media, the content, and the license, have been torn asunder in the information age.