Aristotle did his best to explain plants using the science and observations he had. It makes sense that some of his conclusions were a little off due to lack of modern scientific tools such as microscopes or genome sequencers, and prevalence of alchemy to explain plants. This could be compared to a future where technology becomes so complicated that no human could know enough about a system to explain it in a detail to reverse engineer it. Certainly Aristotle could not have practiced genetic engineering - Can people still engineer computers?
We take information for granted today. Any 7 year old these days can more accurately describe plants than Aristotle after some research on Wikipedia. The one thing that this 7 year old would most likely not be able to offer is an intelligent world view perspective on this information. "On Plants" shows a perspective on science very different from today, and the conclusions generated are most likely different from those today. Most professors would probably agree that plants do not have souls, but that could simply be a different definition of soul, rather than a change in a perspective on life itself.
Can computers have a soul? This question has been asked several times in media, and depends on how life is defined. Aristotle proposed that if plants need water, then they must want water. Computers need electricity to operate, so were they engineered to want electricity? Computers can be categorized in the same way as plants, with differing levels of complexity, but what would complexity actually imply? Until systems gain enough power and intelligence to act as if it had a soul, these questions are just conjecture, but if a "soul" is literally defined and implemented by a programmer in the future, many philosophical and ethical questions will need to be resolved.
To more realistically compare Aristotle's experiences with the subject of plants to modern computing, a fitting scenario is if all semiconductor and software industries disappeared along with their employees. Could an average Joe learn enough about systems to be able to reverse engineer them? It would be reasonable to assume a level of technology could be obtained in 60-70 years since the technology started around WWII. The question I ask is: "How does the complexity in plants compare to the complexity in computers?" It is difficult to answer this without completely knowing both subjects.
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