Information, Knowledge, and “Software”

The recognition that information is the irreplaceable ingredient of all activities and all processes is one of the features of the present era, which has even been labeled the “information age,” although all earlier eras were also informational without realizing it. This is obviously connected with the emergence of machines that handle information, to the point that the word “informatics” is directly associated with these machines. It is significant that the image scientists formed of how living beings functioned, until after the beginning of this century, was fundamentally mechanical. Later, the importance of energy economy was recognized, and a large part of physiology and biochemistry devoted itself to elucidating the molecular mechanisms linked to energy.

This is related to the question of its domain of existence: the symbolic realm. Of course, information in the abstract, without a material support—even the most traditional one of all, the human brain—is difficult to conceive; and transmitting information requires a certain amount of energy. But information is not consubstantial with either that support or that energy, a point tied to the old philosophical dualism of the West and to the way modern productive activities are organized. For example, information is often treated on an epistemic footing with what is “different,” and the task of producing and handling information is classified among services, which creates a fair amount of confusion. Beyond the most complex and esoteric applications of informatics, a certain skill in using a computer and commonly employed programs—word processors, spreadsheets, and databases—is becoming one of the basic components of education. “Computer literacy” is taking the place of literacy in the strict sense, which in more or less developed societies reaches close to one hundred percent of the population. In a few more years, anyone who cannot use a personal computer at an elementary level will find it increasingly difficult to obtain work above the most subordinate tasks. However, this is in turn conditioned by the rapid development of informatics itself. Before long, computers may become so interactive that users will be able to communicate verbally with them without even knowing how to read or write.

This development tends toward making it equally easy and “natural” to communicate with a computer as with another person. The computer faithfully executes the orders it is given, but it lacks imagination and is incapable (for now) of interpreting the ambiguities of natural language. Software production is a huge and constantly growing industry that employs thousands of people and moves tens of billions of dollars annually, and it is not reserved for developed countries. Although the developed countries—above all the United States—undoubtedly dominate this market, software is an important export product for a developing country such as India.

Hard and Soft

As is natural, the development of computers has prompted abundant reflection on the relationship between hardware and software or, more generally, between information and its material support. Thus, in a programmable system it is possible to distinguish several layers or levels arranged in an “onion-skin” model, at the center of which lies the material substrate: the hardware. Yet this already includes microprogrammable components, such as PROMs. Directly above that level operates a virtual machine—the operating system—whose function is to manage the various functional organs of the physical machine and make it transparent or invisible to the user, who communicates exclusively with the higher or more external levels of the concentric structure.

Informatics has a fundamental support: computers, increasingly interconnected in networks. Software—programs—are the sequences of instructions given to the computer that allow users to convey to the machine the instructions for the task to be performed and the data required for it. At the base of these utility programs there are other programs—the operating systems—which constitute the computer’s physiology, the basis of its functioning, upon which the other programs are installed. In the short history of informatics, these programs have acquired enormous complexity; they are increasingly transparent and require ever less specific knowledge on the part of the user.

In communication among human beings, essentially the same thing occurs, although with entirely different physical mechanisms. When people converse with someone, all the deep mechanisms involved in the act remain hidden: from the associative functioning of the brain to the operation of the muscles that make possible the emission of an intelligible language. The history of information consists, to a good extent, in the evolution of physical supports and their operating systems. Besides the human brain, the traditional supports form a long series that begins with clay tablets, papyrus, parchment, and paper. In modern times, of course, a significant number of new supports have appeared, particularly those of informatics. But while this has brought great advantages, it has come at the cost of some inconveniences: whereas traditional supports were directly accessible to reading and writing by trained human beings (that is, literate people), the more recent supports require complex equipment for access. As a counterpart to this limitation, such equipment can handle enormous quantities of information, exchange it among themselves with minimal human participation, and apply it on their own, as robots and other sophisticated devices do. Another type of support is electromagnetic waves, “carriers” of the signals in which information is encoded for transport.