Botched Little Animals

The human brain…has through the ages been portrayed as (a) a hydraulic pumping system, (b) a clock, (c) a telephone switching network, (d) a digital computer, and, now, (e) a large language model. In constructing machines, we also construct ways of seeing the world, and ourselves.

Our tools are mirrors to ourselves.

We build all these systems and we complain about them as if they’re out of control, as if they’re controlling us, but we build them.

[Insert analogy here to complaints about the state of the web by web developers.]

technology is a repository of human desire, a full critique of any machine needs also to be a critique of human desire. We’re the machine’s makers before we’re its victims.