Technology is the product of human ingenuity and effort. Understanding the machine we have created is an attempt to understand ourselves. We are entangled in what we have created and why we have crated them. Lewis Mumford (1935) technology historian, sociologist, and philosopher maintained that the machines we have created are a reflection of our fascination with ourselves. Looking at our most iconic technologies whose evolved forms are important in western cultures to this very day – the telephone, the phonograph (early form of the gramophone) and motion pictures, can be seen to grow out of our own innate interest to understand ourselves – the human voice, the human eye, somatic movement, human relationships. These technologies have evolved out of our own intimate knowledge of the human physiology and anatomy that inspired the development of these technologies.
So what fascinates us with AI, especially the technologies that have evolved from generative AI? It has become an obsession to replicate our humanness and our intelligence, or even to supercharge it onto larger than human forms. This obsessiveness has led us to anthropomorphise robots in a planet already overpopulated with able bodied humans. It has led us to replicate human artwork, music and knowledge at astronomic scale, and imitate our images and voices with precision – all of which were never problems to solve in the first place. We have created virtual worlds that emulate the natural world that sustains us, whilst simultaneously doing nothing to protect it from human destruction.
Humans have been entangled with technology since the beginning of time as we have co-evolved with it. The emergence of intelligent technologies and the growth of techno-political empires however has changed the dynamic of human-technology entanglements. Popular narratives of inevitability and techno-solutionism need to be challenged. What we do next becomes a conscious choice.
Entanglement-AI 