Software bankruptcy filings on the way

And this could be big... in a bad way.

Most adults remember the period 2007-08. The great global financial crisis of those years arose because mortgages and mortgage derivatives were the horse that the whole of the developed world's economies rode upon. That horse was over-loaded and in due course it died.

What is the horse now? On some accounts, a certain sort of software firm, one in the business of selling "software as a service", or SaaS for short, has taken on that role. Equities in these companies, the "app" economy if you will, are the new mortgages. Loans to those companies are the new mortgage derivatives. It is all, again, an overburdened horse.

But what will general artificial intelligence (GAI) do to them? Could its very generality make most of the specific apps that are so important today seem obsolete and pointless? How much wealth will be destroyed if that is the case? Do we face a SaaSpocalypse?

The St Louis based law firm Thompson Coburn has said this: Zombies in the Cap Table and the So-Called SaaS Apocalypse | Thompson Coburn LLP - JDSupra

I leave you for today with that cheerful thought.

Comments

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog