The location aware, augmented reality of the future holds a lot of promise and for the most part I’m pretty excited about it. There is one thing I’m afraid of and that’s a future entirely mediated by those technologies. Techologies built on numbers, statistics and rules. Numbers, statistics and rules that will never completely capture the unique and unpredictable human condition.

What would a future like that be like? A future where serendipity is an algorythm and our reading habits are dictated by amazon.com recomendations. David Boyle’s book, which I stumbled across while wanding around a bookshop (ha! beat that amazon.com!), Authenticity quotes from the play Copenhagen, which has Niels Bohr saying:

It starts with Einstein. He shows that measurement - measurement, on which the whole possibilty of science depends - measurement is not an impersonal event that occurs without impartial universiality. It’s a human act, carried out from a specific point of view in time and space, from one particular veiwpoint of a possible observer. Then here, in Copenhagen in those years in the mid-twenties we discover there is no precisely determinable objective universe. That the universe exists only as a series of approximations. Only with the limits determined by our relationship with it. Only through the understanding lodged inside our head.

And I think the same applies to software and technology. The numbers, statistics and rules, the measurements are all subjective. Software is written from someone’s point of view. If we, and the future, embrace that then I think we could escape a software future.