# 11

Machine Language

                Languaging has been the most important feature of human society for 30,000 years or so.  It has sparked what we call civilization and allowed humans to inhabit the globe.  In those 30,000 years, however, nothing has changed languaging as much as computers have changed it in the last 3 decades.  It would be fair to say that our interactions with each other and the world have never undergone such a profound change, and it has happened in the blink of an eye.  Probably nothing marks the rise of the cyborg more than the devices that we now use to navigate our world.  Everyone with a smart phone holds more information and computing power than existed in the world a mere 50 years ago.

                Who was the last person to have read everything published in their language and culture? Erasmus – maybe?  Ever since Guttenberg we have been speeding up the rate at which the meta-languaging of our culture reproduces and travels.  We have reached the point that machines can do it faster and better than the most capable humans.  The best chess master is no match for Watson, and Siri can spit out answers faster than the smartest and most well- read person you know.  Every teacher knows that if they bluff or flub an answer some student in the back row that you thought was dead or comatose just Googled the right answer and, contrary to everything you thought you knew about dead people, is raising his hand to correct you.  Calculations that used to take scientists hours and days to make are now routinely spit out of computerized instruments in seconds.

                What are we to make of the notion of knowledge or intelligence in this new context?  I think we can only make sense of these developments by realizing that we’re really talking about two very different things.  Information is not intelligence.  The purpose of human intelligence is not a more accurate description of what we take to be the external world.  Machine intelligence is not the same and does not operate on the same principles as human intelligence.  The only real danger posed by machine intelligence is to confuse it with the purposes and functions of human intelligence.  We have got to let go of the notion that our ‘brain’ is like a computer and that the more we can cram into it and the faster we can recall it the smarter we are. 

                I want to make it clear that I am not against machine intelligence – unless you want to replace humans with machines – in which case I’m with Hawking saying that is dangerous.    I think machine intelligence makes patterns and data comprehendible in ways that are both fascinating and useful.  I am not arguing against machine intelligence, I just want to draw a distinction between it and what I think are the uses and purposes of human intelligence.  In fact, I would even credit machine intelligence with bringing the West to this point of consciousness that clearly demonstrates that the Cartesian definition of knowing is hopeless.  We are no more a challenge to computers and their ability to store, recall and combine information that John Henry and his hammer were to the steam drill.  Now that we should no longer confuse information with intelligence we have a chance, at last, to ask what it means to know and to think.

                Just as we learned to stop using our bodies as machines to move and control the physical world, we have to now learn to stop using our consciousness as a machine to control and manipulate the social and material world.  The things that are lacking in the intellectual and spiritual world are not lacking because we need more data.  They are lacking because we have lost a sense of connection.  Maturana and Fell like to present the basic condition we all face as having to deal with the fact that we are always already both connected and autonomous.  We are in the world, not outside of it.  I am not saying that everything is relative and there is no reality.  I’m saying that we will never reconnect to the world through reason and science alone.  It’s easy to prove that climate change exists, but almost impossible to get someone who doesn’t already see it to agree.  We argue about facts and let larger truths and greater wisdom escape in the bargain.  Let the machines do what machines do, and let us start to figure out what it is we should do instead.