Simon Willison linked to an essay by Nilay Patel — published at The Verge — calling it “a superb piece of commentary, and something I expect I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.” Patel’s central argument, as quoted by Willison, is that technologists who see the world through what Patel calls “software brain” are becoming increasingly detached from everyone else, and that AI is accelerating that split rather than bridging it.
The essay is Patel’s; Willison links and quotes with minimal additional commentary.
What Patel means by software brain
Patel is quoted by Willison as describing the problem: “software brain has ruled the business world for a long time. AI has just made it easier than ever for more people to make more software than ever before.”
The limit of this worldview, as Patel frames it in the quoted passage, is that it cannot account for the full scope of human experience: “not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database.” Patel concludes, in the passage Willison quotes: “That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.”
The smart home as evidence
Patel uses smart home automation as an example, and is quoted by Willison: “huge companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation.” His argument, per Willison’s excerpt, is that this is not a failure of execution or marketing but of premise — that mainstream consumers do not experience their home environment as a system to be optimized.
Patel’s essay states, in Willison’s quotation: “The people do not yearn for automation.”
Willison’s framing
Willison describes the piece as worth thinking about for a long time and links to it without further editorial conclusion. The original essay and video are available at The Verge.