I don’t believe there is/has been a software crisis. Software is everywhere, doing things previously impossible, and continually advancing. One can compare with other industries for perspective.

The way I see the future happening is mostly a gradual disappearance of software. Common, limited, uses of software spread and solidify, copies of ‘applications’ are then bought not built. It is a steady escalation of reuse. The commercial forces toward that must be irrestistable.

As a detail I would foresee a great simplification and specialisation of ‘development’. Business domains would have quasi-technical people ‘configuring’ business applications. That would be my angle on ’smart servant’.

“Let me see if I’ve got your idea correctly. You’re talking about building software that is “smart”, so that it will eliminate the need for other software?”

Hmmm, a very intriguing concept indeed, however, that’s not what I had in mind.

When I talk about the ’smart servant’, I typically think of something like this:

Let’s say that I’m in the middle of a very delicate operation, such as painting my back porch floor in a sweltering summer day, or something like that. All of a sudden, as I’m working, I feel mighty thirsty, and I tell my ’smart servant’:

“I feel like having a beer!”

What I expect him to do then is go fetch me a cold beer, and serve it in a shady spot in my back yard. I wouldn’t want him to go get a beer and then calously barge into the painted area and shove the beer in my face while I’m in the middle of holding my brush.

A ’smart servant’ works on the principle of ‘do what I mean’, not on the principle ‘do what I tell you to do’.

You overwhelm me! I was astonished to find so much intelligent discussion on this topic today. Believe me, I’ve learned a lot by reading your thoughts posted above. I feel totally humbled now.

Thank you!

I think a premise of this is an employer/employee model where decisions and transfer of knowledge is unidirectional. Even software experts who participate in the process are taken out of the production side into management. It’s a system where hierarchy becomes the defining structure of an organization, not skill or duties or complementary roles.

A market-based approach is something of an alternative, but markets don’t generally allow for intelligent conversations. The “conversation” in the market is statically inferred, a metaphor, not a literal exchange. But conversations — literal, not metaphorical — are important to good design. While some problems can be solved with wise producers who speculate on the utility of a product (common for mass-marketed software), this isn’t feasible for a large class of problems where the resulting risk is too great, and the software producer has significantly different domain knowledge from the software consumer.

To me the “smart servant” implies some combination of these two ideas.

With industrialization in place the small details of cogs and wheels don’t have to be thought about, and the creator can operate on a higher level. As in the difference between writing in assembly as opposed to writing in Java or C#.

Unless I’m completely missing the point of what a smart servant should be I see it as almost one and the same. You industrialize to have the smart servant.

I suppose an example of something like this would be Google. When I search on Google, many times I feel like it’s reading my mind. It’s not just the relevance of the search results, it’s the often psychic “special hits” at the top - like Calculator, Phone Book, News Articles, etc. Such “mind reading” isn’t easy, though.

I think, however, it would be somewhat wasted effort to code up a general case for all the one-offs and corner-cases. Sometimes, a specialized program works the best.

Or am I reading your idea wrong?