Number 5
Is Alive
Software stops being built and starts being born.
A personal note
Growing up in India, I heard the Ramayana and the Mahabharata told and retold by my grandmother, with gods and goddesses working miracles at every turn.
But the biggest miracle of my childhood came from a Hollywood movie: a military robot struck by lightning, waking up with a mind of his own. Number 5. Unlike the miracles in those stories, this one looked like something a person could build.
I didn’t know then that it would take almost forty years for a miracle like that to reach my hands. Now it has.
Code has come alive. Not the way Number 5 did, with lightning and consciousness, but as software born on demand for the work at hand. I see a future where every healthcare workflow can have the software it needs, when it needs it, in service of humankind. More of the administration carried by machines. More human time for human care.
To be continued.
The rest of this essay is still to be written.