Philip Sheldrake

Tag: neurosymbolic AI (page 1 of 1)

4 June 2026 / 0 Comments

Software 4.0 — A New Neurosymbolic AI

Photo titled "MicroRNA Delivery" by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.

We’ve reached an uncanny milestone in tech. We are building intimate conversational bonds with AI chatbots, yet the software infrastructure surrounding our daily lives remains as rigid, silent, and fragile as ever.

LLMs tease us with their facilities to write code, but forcing this new form of intelligence to work with programming paradigms that pre-date the World Wide Web is driving a silent crisis of structural decay in large-scale software systems.

This post introduces the Software 4.0 era. Informed by biological processes, it turns software into a living, self-verifying organism that provides the perfect complement to LLMs. It transforms how we build and co-evolve the digital fabric of our world.

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24 February 2026 / 0 Comments

Something Big Could Be Happening: A response to Matt Shumer’s post

Abstract image that looks vaguely like a planet rotating at speed.

A 2022 article in Noema magazine describes apophenia as "faulty pattern recognition. People see faces in clouds and alien ruins on Mars. ... Humans are pattern-recognizing creatures, and so apophenia is built in."

A Google engineer had claimed an LLM to be conscious, sentient, and indeed a person, and the article explores reasons for why he had reached such a conclusion. It's well worth a read, particularly its observation that we apply concepts that have wholly anthropomorphic heritage and meaning to LLM technology. Pehaps we need new vocabulary.

The technology's stochastic prowess is much advanced 42 months later, and perhaps that's all the more reason we continue to see things that aren't there. Matt Shumer's "Something Big Is Happening" is the latest example.

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