The idea that there is much more computation (and intelligence/agency) going on in biological and other systems seems to be getting more popular. (The author writes: The whole body is a computer: it’d be wasteful for evolution to only use the brain for computation when other systems could take part too.). Michael Levin has some super interesting ideas about this.
I think the difference now is that traditional software ultimately comes down to a long series of if/then statements (also the old AI's like Wolfram), whereas the new AI (mainly LLM's) have a fundamentally different approach.