One answer to the question, from Bryan Cantrill:

> The thing that is remarkable about it is that it has this property of being information—that we made it up—but it is also machine, and it has these engineered properties. And this is where software is unlikely anything we have ever done, and we're still grappling on that that means. What does it mean to have information that functions as machine? It's got this duality: you can see it as both.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHPa5-BWd4w&t=4m37s

> We suffer -- tremendously -- from a bias from traditional engineering that writing code is like digging a ditch: that it is a mundane activity best left to day labor -- and certainly beneath the Gentleman Engineer. This belief is profoundly wrong because software is not like a dam or a superhighway or a power plant: in software, the blueprints _are_ the thing; the abstraction _is_ the machine.

* https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2007/07/28/on-the-beauty-in-bea...

There's a similar article I read on this in regards to intelligence and LLMs that says simulated intelligence _is_ intelligence.