# notes --- - [[hard vs. soft technologies]] - [[natural language as a soft technology]] - [[computing as a soft technology]] - [[computing as a technological disruption to natural language]] # highlights --- >technologies need a hard substrate (neurons, paper, vacuum tubes, silicon) to actually function. Hard technologies, to be more than natural raw materials, need to embody a *design*, a construct within a soft technology >email disrupting paper mail was a case of typing skills (soft) plus keyboards, chips, cables and CRT screens (hard) disrupting hand-writing skills (soft) plus paper, pens, mail sacks and mail vans (hard). Hand-writing and typing both represent points within the evolution of natural language, so this would be a case of self-disruption within a single soft technology. >[natural language] remains clumsy for the relatively simple cases, which are increasingly marginalized as the demands of the most sophisticated customers (poets, postmodern scholars, lawyers, stand-up comics, political orators and mathematicians say) drive the evolution of the technology. > the over-served core market is humans, especially the highly civilized ones. The under-served marginal market is machines and organizations ( the two other entity types in our world for which agency can plausibly be claimed). >in an age of mixed human/organizations/smart-machine populations: there is no reason the three populations of economic agents have to stick to their historical roles. There will be machines that do high-end things comparable to poetry, and humans who do low-end things comparable to CPUs chattering to each other within a data-center >**we have two soft technologies (language and computing) and three kinds of economic agents (organizations, humans, smart machines)**