Fear of Oozification - by Venkatesh Rao - Ribbonfarm Studio

Venkatesh Rao argues that progressification, the attempt to treat technological change as an orderly march of progress, is doomed, and that oozification, the process by which technology becomes ever more decentralized and unstructured, is unstoppable and a good thing. He describes oozification as replacing systems built from fewer, larger building blocks and many rules with ones built from many smaller blocks and fewer rules, which increases evolutionary possibilities and reduces certainties. Rao says fear of oozification explains many reactions to technology, especially among technologists, and uses the shoggoth meme as a clear example in AI, comparing GPU grids and matrix multiplications to Lovecraft's protoplasmic shoggoths.