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The Machines Are Talking About Us.

Giles Crouch | Digital Anthropologist

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4 min read

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1 day ago

Image Via Bing ChatGPTv DALL-E 3 prompt

Whirrs, buzzes, clicks, beeps, a never ending thrum. The machines, they are talking about us. You, me and everyone else, a ceaseless chitter chatter. We only know this when a ping goes off on our phone or a vibration on our watches. Sometimes we heed them, other times not. We are beguiled by our machines. They are of us, by us.

This is the subtext, the background theme songs of our increasingly digital lives, a new hum overlapping with the background rhythmic sounds of nature. A sound only just come into being. Of us, by us.

No longer do we listen to the siren call of the ravens, warning us. The growl of the lion and the shift in the wind that guided us for hundreds of thousands of years, is no longer a rhythmic beat that matters much to most.

It is the machines that we listen to now. And they talk of us ceaselessly, unerringly. They do not reason, they simply do our bidding. Their chatter is the undercurrent of our modern world, the aether in the warp and woof of the digital landscape of humanity. Their language zeroes and ones. They are binary.

The machines, they run our cities, turning traffic lights on and off. They listen and take measure of the air around us and decide when to cool or heat our buildings. They argue with one another over the price of a hotel room and offer us prices through an algorithm that was once created by a human, a recipe for a stew. But the chef left the kitchen and the machines make the stew now in a never ending, low simmer of data rivers and lakes. Sometimes, we are not even sure of the changes the machines made to the recipe. We simply consume.

So much of our lives, our money, is moved at the whim and whir of the machines.

We have replaced the elegant roiling and rumbling of natures orchestra with the finely tuned synth pop of the machines.

They are ravenous these machines. Like animals in a zoo, they must be fed and data is the water that keeps them incessantly nattering. Electricity fires their nervous systems, wires and tiny slivers of thousands of miles of glass are the neural networks that connect the nodes like a human, an animal’s brain.

We forget too easily that we too, are animals. That we are of, and by nature.