Project Background

Inspired by Nature

While incomplete, our understanding of the universe has greatly improved over the last few centuries. From a created universe given by an almighty deity, unchanging, stable and centered on the human species to an infinite, chaotic and constantly changing at all levels structured mess where everything fight for survival every given nanoseconds (event if time does not exists). While this might be anxiety-provoking for many, most of us continue our lives as normal, oblivious to the thousands of deadly wars surrounding us at any given moment. We grab a coffee, we walk on the street, look at cars stuck in trafic and breathe a healthy lot of bacteria and viruses to properly keep our immune system on edge! We do all of this because our brain is able to abstract things away. To ignore what we perceive as noise and non-threatening and focus on what's essential to our survival, like the lion closing in or the slippery patch of ice on the sidewalk for the most urban among us!

We use abstractions everywhere and I would argue that it is one of the greatest learning and adaptation tool we have in our monkey bag of tricks. But abstractions can lead to approximation, which leads to simplification and misadaptation. When you look at your friend, you don't see a bunch of atoms sticking together as much as possible while she hurries down the bike lane to work. You see a woman. A discrete entity. You don't see the ecosystem of organs and organisms competing for the sugar rush generated by her intake of orange juice 15 minutes ago. You don't see millions of bacteria dying every seconds, replaced by whole new ones ready to hold the trenches in the constant war we call life. If you look deeper, she's mostly a bunch (60%, very big bunch) of hydrogen and oxygen atoms tightly stuck together and moving around in a choreography we call a human being. But at this level, the boundary between your friend and the universe gets quite fuzzy. So how much of the atoms around her affects the evolution and the structure of her as a human? I would say a lot.

From all this existential philosophy, we can learn lessons that can be applied to how we reason about software. One thing that shocked me when I started working in software professionnally (something like 35 years ago!) is the strong belief that software is just like hardware, without the hardware. People treat software like a product, with a beginning and an end, a discrete product that can be shrink wrapped, bundled, distributed and left unused on our hard-drive. Just like our early understanding of the universe, we think about software running in an unchanging universe. We, software developers, think of a universe in a vaccum, build it and distribute it to users for their enjoyment. We are mini-gods creating mini-universes and resting after a good release crunch. But, like your friend, software is an abstraction. A high-level rendering of a much more complex and constanly changing reality. Depending on the innovation and volatility of this reality, the mocked universe you built to understand your software product is obsolete when it's first released. We then gives two choices to our beloved users: transform your reality and use the software simplifications or keep your reality and use other tools around our software to bridge the reality gap. Our industry evolved around providing better tools, processes and the ultimate trick inherited from hardware: reusable components! We spend all our efforts on the software factory while we should focus on figuring out a new way to think about software.

As I discuss in Rethink Software, the world is constantly changing and obsolete software islands are everywhere around us, feeding on our capital to remain relevant. It takes a lot of energy to keep something stable in a chaotic world. The fight against entropy in software is an expensive one (and one already lost). This money is not spent on innovation or real business or society problems. It's just wasted, inneficient and after 35 years of living it. I'm really tired of our caveman approach to computing, wasting money and resources on obsolete or brute force approaches. I make it my mission to change it.

Emerging from prehistoric computing

Beyond money concerns and the sheer level of wasted efforts in repeating the same mistakes over and over again, but using different devices and platforms, humanity needs to move beyong prehistoric computing and let go of the hardware shackles that have plague and misguided software since its inception. It's time to free software from the hands of hardware or unimaginative software engineers following pre-existing rules without questioning them. We need to create a path forward where software exists beyond the constraints of a physical computing device, not as an integration of multiple networked devices used by users, but as a single living organism spaning multiple devices and connecting people, organizations, systems and AI actors. A kind of social network, but for software code instead of cat pictures. You would think that blockchains are doing this and you'd be partially right as I indicate in my critical look at decentralized applications.

Moving pasts prehistoric computing means getting rid of anything that is built, packaged, bundled and somehow duplicated, distributed and consumed like a product. Software is not a product. Software is the distribution channel, the highway, the universe in which information can be securely shared, monetized, transformed, improved, published and republished and constantly updated as it's normative source is updated. This is a modern operating system, letting you leverage the whole power of modern computing, not just manage opaque files in a folder or other local computing resources nobody cares about. Hardware devices should be commoditized and their low-level operating systems (a.k.a Linux) made available to a real modern operating system really managing your digital footprint and contribution to the digital society.

Inflation, Political unrest and AI transition

I truly believe that software can change the lives of billions of people. It already been proven many times with the advent of personal computing, mobile devices, video calls and social networks. Software can change the way people live for the best but also for the worst. Under the veil of anonymity, various interest groups are manipulating public opinion and with AI generated content, this trend will only worsen. The devaluation of fiat money in many countries, imploding on the weight of sovereign debts, populism and disrupted fragile supply chains causing inflation and making everything on the verge of spiraling out of control. We've been able to cope with the fragmentation of our primitive computing worlds in the past 35 years by building bridges between systems, centralizing data into mega corporations and leveraging emerging markets to keep costs under control, but this is nearly over now. The only solution to keep innovating in software is to get rid of humans and leverage the next generation of cheap labour: AI. In a world where money is getting concentrated into the hands of a few, the advent of AI will disrupt the last layer of our modern economies: services. Not just low-level services like call centers or grocery stores, but high paying software, finance, engineering jobs that will get replaced by AI. The resulting savings and profits will go to the same greedy corporations and the net impact will be a poorer middle class. The next steps are more civil unrests, more government expenses, more inflation and a total collapse of our democratic systems within a decade or two.

But there's a way for our society to stop wasting billions on bad software and pave the way for AI adoption in collaboration with human actors, no in competition. We still have time, but we need to take the turn quickly otherwise, we'll all end up in reservations, living our human lives until we revert back to our most primitive self.

Living Software Platform

Reflyx is an open project where we will push forward this vision of fluid or living software. We think that we need to go back and rethink about software from scratch, without the constraints of the classic isolated single computer on which all our industry is built. As our universe, we need to move beyond our perceived abstractions and think about software as constantly rearranging and fighting fragments, emerging, dying and improving as they are used and abandonned. We need each human to become a system, to consume fluid information, to enrich, publish and monetize data, processes or analysis. Humans must be able to use all their creativity and intelligence to constantly improve the living software around us, improve our society, otherwise, AI will gradually take over our systems and humanity will be less and less in control of its own destiny, for the better or worst.

A single project like Reflyx cannot change the world alone, but we hope that by showing the way to a more efficient and fluid software world, we can help steer it in the right direction, around the storm that is building up in front of us. Don't hesitate to reach out and join us in building this future!