[darby_nine]

> If you think about it, all software is already an abstraction of hardware by definition.

Not really—interaction with a lot of hardware is defined by software. Just looking at a cpu you have no clue how someone would use it or what they would use it for or even what kind of capabilities it has for human interaction.

[coronapl]

Isn't software itself an abstraction layer to communicate with the underlying physical components? In theory, it's possible to build a machine that solves a problem without any software at all. Isn't this what an automaton represents—hardware directly engineered to perform specific tasks without the need for software?

[darby_nine]

> Isn't hardware itself an abstraction layer to communicate with the underlying physical components?

Sure, but you're really straining the word "abstraction" here. By this definition all metaphysical concepts are just abstractions around material reality. Which is fine, albeit not that useful a definition of abstraction.

[coronapl]

I agree. My point was that all software components rely on some form of abstraction. A SaaS, for example, is essentially a wrapper around a database, just as the database itself is a wrapper around OS APIs, and so on.