Today (12th March, 2018) is the World Wide Web’s 29th birthday.  Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the “inventor of the world-wide web”), in an interview with the Financial Times and in this Web Foundation post has used this anniversary to raise awareness of how the web behemoths Facebook, Google and Twitter are “promoting misinformation and ‘questionable’ political advertising while exploiting people’s personal data”.  Whilst I admire hugely Tim Berners-Lee’s universe-denting invention it has to be said he himself is not entirely without fault in the way he bequeathed us with his invention.  In his defence, hindsight is a wonderful thing of course, no one could have possibly predicted at the time just how the web would take off and transform our lives both for better and for worse.

If, as Marc Andreessen famously said in 2011, software is eating the world then many of those powerful tech companies are consuming us (or at least our data and I’m increasingly becoming unsure there is any difference between us and the data we choose to represent ourselves by.

Here are five recent examples of some of the negative ways software is eating up our world.

• Fake news stories on Facebook may have swung the US election in favour of Donald Trump.
• Yahoo suffered the greatest data breach in history and only discovered it over three years later.
• Robots are set to eliminate more and more jobs, including the previously relative safe jobs of middle class employees.
• Online ‘trolls’ are forcing more and more women off platforms like Twitter in seemingly unchecked abusive and misogynistic attacks.
• Algorithms, created by the likes of Google and Facebook, may be changing the ways we think and act without us even being aware of their existence.

Over the past 40+ years the computer software industry has undergone some fairly major changes.  Individually these were significant (to those of us in the industry at least) but if we look at these changes with the benefit of hindsight we can see how they have combined to bring us to where we are today.  A world of cheap, ubiquitous computing that has unleashed seismic shocks of disruption which are overthrowing not just whole industries but our lives and the way our industrialised society functions.  Here are some highlights for the 40 years between 1976 and 2016.

And yet all of this is just the beginning.  This year we will be seeing technologies like serverless computing, blockchain, cognitive and quantum computing become more and more embedded in our lives in ways we are only just beginning to understand.  Doubtless the fallout from some of the issues I highlight above will continue to make themselves felt and no doubt new technologies currently bubbling under the radar will start to make themselves known.

I have written before about how I believe that we, as software architects, have a responsibility, not only to explain the benefits (and there are many) of what we do but also to highlight the potential negative impacts of software’s voracious appetite to eat up our world.

This is my 201st post on Software Architecture Zen (2016/17 were barren years in terms of updates).  This year I plan to spend more time examining some of the issues raised in this post and look at ways we can become more aware of them and hopefully not become so seduced by those sirenic entrepreneurs.