What Software Should Be Like

This was originally a website, WhatSoftwareShouldBeLike.ca intended to collect various bright ideas, daydreams, plans, nutty notions, and various other fantasies about future software. It was to serve some of the purposes described the page Technological Fantasies, which also had its own website at one time.

What Software Should Be Like was intended to promote some of the author's own views on software, but also to collect those of others. It had room for Vinge-like fantasies about software 8 millenia in the future, but also for daydreams about the next two or three major versions of Linux, Apache, Word, or Windows.

It also had room for dry requirements analysis, of course, but also for pure science fiction, and it was expected that there might be more of the latter. Some of the software described in the e-books available via the Technological Fantasies page is clearly science fiction, or technological fiction. References to specific parts of those books will be included on this page Real Soon Now.

It wass hoped that the technological fantasies on this sight will at least prove entertaining, but their real purpose was to make sure future software is better than some of the junk we have to use today.

Making a real website for WhatSoftwareShouldBeLike.ca or something with a similar name would be a good idea. A a successful non-profit organization based on this idea could make a real contribution to the technology. But that would take a genuine committment from somebody, and lot of work. I still hope this will happen. It might happen sooner if somebody volunteers to help make it so.

Please help. Help create an organization, put up a site, and make sure this site will be filled with provocative ideas and subtle analysis by contributing your own software fantasies.

The links include pages representing possible sister sites. The mother of all sister sites, so to speak, is the award-winning SocialTechnology site, which is dedicated to providing genuine solutions to social problems.

Crime, including terrorism, poverty, boring dead-end jobs, homelessness, illiteracy, and even the emotional pain of loneliness are all social problems that can respond to hi-tech mathematical software based on numerical analysis and graph theory.

Some of those "genuine solutions" are being designed and implemented now. Are you a mathematician or software genius? If so, please give us some of your valuable time. A good graphics artist would be nice, too. If you even think you might be interested in helping make the world a better place, please send us a message via the author's e-mail address, given below.

If you are not interested in open-source software development, non-profit organizations, and other non-commercial projects, please read about the proposed commercial application, which is described in the CASA Proposal or look at the page which could serve as a temporary home page for a site based on that proposal: Computer Aided SocialActivity.

Please see these web pages:

The main Social Technology page.

Find Compatibles, the key page, with the real solution to all other problems explained

Technological Fantasies , a page about future technology

Social Tech a page about Social Technology, technology for social purposes. I think I was the first person to use this phrase on the Internet, quite a long time ago.

Roughly corresponding to these web pages are the following blogs:

Social Technology the main blog, hosted on this site, with posts imported from the following blogger.com blogs, which still exist and are useable.

Find Compatibles devoted to matching people with friends, lovers, jobs, places to live and so on, but doing so in ways that will actually work, using good math, good algorithms, good analysis.

Technological Fantasies devoted to future stuff, new ideas, things that might be invented or might happen, such as what is listed above and below.

Sex-Politics-Religion is a blog about these important topics, which I have been told should never be mentioned in polite conversation. Alright that advice does seem a bit dated, but many people are still told not to bring up these subjects around the dinner table.

I believe I was the first person on the Internet to use the phrase Social Technology -- years before the Web existed.

Those were the good old days, when the number of people using the net exceeed the amount of content on it, so that it was easy to start a discussion about such an upopular topic. Now things are different. There are so many web pages that the chances of anyone finding this page are low, even with good search engines like Google. Oh, well.

By Social Technology I mean the technology for organizing and maintaining human society. The example I had most firmly in mind is the subject of Find Compatibles, what I consider to be the key page, the one with the real solution to all other problems explained.

As I explained on my early mailing lists and later webpages, I find that social technology has hardly improved at all over the years. We still use representative democracy, exactly the same as it was used in the 18th century. By contrast, horse and buggy transporation has been replaced by automobiles and airplanes, enormous changes.

In the picture below you will see some 18th century technology, such as the ox-plow in the middle of the picture. How things have changed since then in agricultural technology. But we still use chance encounters, engagements and marriages to organize our home life and the raising of children.

I claim that great advances in social technology are not only possible but inevitable. I have written three novels about this, one preposterously long, 5000 pages, another merely very very long, 1500 pages. The third is short enough at 340 pages to be published some day. Maybe. The topic is still not interesting to most people. I will excerpt small parts of these novels on the web sometime, maybe even post the raw text for the larger two.

This site includes many pages dating from 1997 to 2008 which are quite out of date. They are included here partly to show the development of these ideas and partly to cover things the newer pages do not. There will be broken links where these pages referenced external sites. I've tried to fix up or maiintain all internal links, but some will probably have been missed. One may wish to look at an earlier version of this page, rather longer, and at an overview of most parts of what can be called a bigger project.

Type in this address to e-mail me. The image is interesting. See Status of Social Technology

I have used a series of e-mail address over the years, each of which eventually became out of date because of a change of Internet services or became almost useless because of spam. Eventually I stuck with a Yahoo address, but my inbox still fills up with spam and their spam filter still removes messages I wanted to see. So I have switched to a new e-mail service. Web spiders should not be able to find it, since it is hidden in a jpeg picture. I have also made it difficult to reach me. The picture is not a clickable link. To send me e-mail you must want to do so badly enough to type this address in. That is a nuisance, for which I do apologize, but I just don't want a lot of mail from people who do not care about what I have to say.

What Software Should Be Like

Other relevant content:

Please see these web pages:

Cross-References: