[Avicebron]

Planes, trains, and automobiles are tech. Software is a specific subset, software is a subset of tolling and techniques that's applied to "tech" no more than circuit boards, wires, or the wheel. It doesn't have a special elevated status. The more people understand that the faster people will stop hero worshipping it.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> stop hero worshipping it

I guess that's the case for software-centric platforms. It was not my experience.

I worked for hardware-centric corporations, for most of my career, and became used to having software treated as a "nice to have, but not essential" part of the product. In many cases, my work (and myself) were treated with contempt. I got used to being sneered at.

In my experience, this was a disastrous attitude, because, despite lots of folks wishing it weren't so, hardware, these days, is software.

Software pervades everything, from the compiled silicon on peripheral ASICS and FPGAs, to the firmware that drives said chips.

In my experience, firmware was treated as hardware, and the same rigid, waterfall process was applied to firmware, that was done for the hardware.

Worked great.

Until it didn't.

Software is a drastically different beast from hardware. I won't bother going into the reasons. Anyone with a smattering of knowledge in the area, can list them.

In any case, the hardware folks would treat any attempt to leverage the flexibility that software allows as "cowboy, low-quality, laziness." It was Waterfall, or you were a "bad engineer," and "lazy and undisciplined."

I'm really big on Disciplined software development. That does not make me popular with this crowd. It also does not mean Waterfall.

In my opinion, there's no way to avoid the difficult parts of engineering, but it's also important to be adaptive, responsive, and, dare I say it, "agile."

[closeparen]

It has special elevated status economically because of near-zero marginal cost. Circuit boards, wires, and vehicles are brutally competitive businesses where you try to squeeze $/performance out of Mother Nature like blood from a stone. Software is so far from these physical frontiers that that incredibly wasteful architectures can create enormous amounts of business value.

[MonkeyClub]

Heck, even toilet flushes are cybernetic devices in one sense, ie they work by virtue of a self regulating feedback loop.

It seems that with software we’re hell bent on verifying Arthur Clarke’s aphorism wrt sufficiently advanced tech being indistinguishable from magic.

Think language models, for a contemporary example.

[marssaxman]

> Planes, trains, and automobiles are tech.

Reading and writing are "tech", if you insist on going down this pedantic road; but that's not what most people mean by that term in this context.

[perardi]

I’m gonna disagree just a bit here, because it loops back around to the possible end of the “tech” hype.

Cars have been tech in this finance and investment bubble. Tesla, obviously, but then lots and lots of electric vehicle and autonomous driving startups came in with the whole song and dance of “disrupting the incumbents” and “move fast and break things” and “let’s milk customers forever and ever with subscriptions for self-driving taxis as a service”.

Which is in the process of going poof. (Remember Nikola? No. Good.). Lots and lots of hype about startups and subscriptions, and we’ve ended up with GM having arguably the best autonomous driving tech, and Ford having arguably the most hyped recent EV with the F-150.

[paulryanrogers]

Words can evolve. Here on this forum and in large parts of culture, 'technology' is any relatively recent innovation. Of which software is one of the more prominent examples.

[willcipriano]

Few would debate that the printing press is one of the most important pieces of tech humanity ever produced. At first it was used to print Bibles, but it was eventually used to print all sorts of other things. The philosophical texts that were later printed on the printing press were not a new "tech", but we pretend new apps for a iPhone are for some reason.

When we increase the surface area of a definition like you are here it makes words meaningless.

[paulryanrogers]

FWIW, I'm only stating what seems obvious to me. You can disagree though I suspect trying to narrow the definition at this point will be pushing a rock up hill or swimming up stream.

My view of words like technology is they are more like sliding windows, covering what the zeitgeist is classifying. Somewhat like the word 'fashion' or 'fad' aren't limited to any one specific kind of dress or style.

The word 'technology' would be less useful if it always had to be qualified to exclude everything from fire and the wheel up to the transistor?