"Artificially" Intelligent

Five and a half thousand years ago accountants housed by the brick walls of Mesopotamia’s ziggurats pressed their reeds into soft wet clay. While the markings noted events that we may now argue to be mundane (the storage of food in the city's central granary), the same mundane assessment cannot be applied to the act of the notation itself. Through both laziness and ease of use the accountants had abstracted their symbols of what goods had entered and left their stores. At a certain point a transition was made, from pictographic imagery to what is today considered the first written language; Cuneiform. Transferring language from vibrations emitted from dancing tongues and echoes of our consciousness into something material changed everything. For once the words we say no longer exist in the temporal realms of our daily theatre and instead become fixed, permanent and extraneous to ourselves new realms of thinking could become uncovered. From pouring out your broken heart into your diary or trying to work out what you need to buy and add to your shopping list, the ability to externalise and preserve ideas outside of our fleshly bodies can help us with our own thoughts greatly.




Writing is a tool, an extension of the mind which allows us to carve new pathways of exploration. Plato famously said of our relationship to writing “It will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks”. And while I lament the eternal grumpy boomer attitude of warning the younglings about the upcoming new fangled technology, Plato was right to point out that writing fundamentally changes how the human mind works. By changing our psyche, writing changed the world. Whether it was Nasir al-Din al-Tusi whose skywards plots of the planets paths laid the groundwork for trigonometry or René Descartes whose Meditations of Philosophies made us question our own reality; it was as much their thoughts as there written words that left a mark on this world.


In the information age the amusing thing is language has never been both so simple and yet so complex. All our digital data (or at least till quantum computing is firmly established) is stored in either a 0 or a 1. It is only through complex combinations that such simple binary terms can elicit a dynamic outcome. In these knitted webs of code we can find everything from poetry, to games, to porn. Right now, in news articles and in senate hearings there is a word hot on everyone's lips; AI. The newest and most intricate form of language is emerging as face detectors and image manipulators. I imagine our relationship with AI in the same way consumers held their relationship with radiation during the late 1930’s. It's something novel, something to paint on fun glowing clock dials or slap on stickers to sell new products. It’s something that at the time only a few people could comprehend its full destructive and liberating potential. I cannot definitively say whether AI will become the Hero or the Villain, whether it will be the radioactive elements they use for chemotherapy or whether it will be at the core of the next fusion bomb, I can simply guess it will probably be a little bit of both.