Major Themes
The central technological speculation of the series are the "boppers", a kind of robot with artificial intelligence developed through natural selection rather than through design. Crediting mathematician Kurt Gödel with the germ of the idea, Software declares: "We cannot build an intelligent robot.... But we can cause one to evolve." By creating self-replicating robots whose programming is randomly altered periodically (and who can exchange programming information with each other in a form of sexual reproduction), and then forcing these robots to pass "fitness tests" in order to survive, Rucker suggests, true artificial intelligence that equals or surpasses the human brain could be developed. (Rucker discusses this same idea in his nonfiction work Infinity and the Mind.)
Rucker also uses the series to discuss his philosophical ideas, beliefs that he has described elsewhere as mysticism. "A person is just hardware plus software plus existence," the character Cobb Anderson declares in Software, to another character whose father has recently died:
- Potential existence is as good as actual existence. That's why death is impossible. Your software exists permanently and indestructibly as a certain possibility, a certain mathematical set of relations. Your father is now an abstract, non-physical possibility. But nevertheless he exists!
Later, in Wetware, Anderson observes: "The bottom line is that we're all information processors, and God loves all of us just the same.... All is One, and the One is Everywhere."
Read more about this topic: Ware Tetralogy
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