A Small Matter of Programming is a classic book focused on how to create malleable tools that normal users can understand and build: end-user programming.

It was written in 1993, and the tools at hand were limited.

At one point they try to imagine how to get emergent, self-assembling software, and the only tools they have are constraint solvers.

They conclude, effectively, "The number of constraints balloons exponentially to model any real world phenomena. It's impossible to represent enough context in a concrete enough representation to allow this to be feasible."

You'd somehow need all of humanity's background context compressed into a tiny little hyperobject that you could cheaply, easily, and quickly query with arbitrary questions.

Hmmmm….