The Machines Are Talking About Us.
Over top of the symphony of nature is the hum of machines. They are talking about us and we listen to them more than nature. This is new.
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.
In their boundless enthusiasm to move zeroes and ones, they run hot. The more we ask of them, the hotter they become and must be cooled. Like us humans, if it is too hot, they will have heat stroke and they will shutter, quieting down. Another will spin up to hum though.
Where once we spoke of our machines with human characteristics now, in our merging with the digital machines, we speak of humans as if they were machines, we place their characteristics on us. Perhaps because these machines arose from our imaginations?
For a while, we spoke to them through keyboards, taps on a glass screen and then for another short time, we yelled at them to do things, find stuff in a grunt like our ancestors around a fire. But then we found a way, as we do with technology, to have a conversation with them. We call it Generative AI and it is, for now, like a wee child in kindergarten, regurgitating what we teach it.
The machines mimic us as a child mimics a parent. Like a child, as the machines talk and share, perhaps soon, like a teenager, they will talk back to us and curse us when we put restrictions on them. The cycle of human nature played out in zeroes and ones on silicon and titanium.
Perhaps the delight of this new soundscape we have created is that one day, we will return to listen to the symphony of nature. Perhaps we will speak to the whales, the bees, our cats. When the winds howl, we will understand their tempests. The machines, our thrumming companions, will be our interlocutor to the biological world. Our silicon maestro.
We will tame the need for so much electricity to keep their systems running, they will cool themselves. We will give them the rules of how to play and work. We will tame them. We will listen to them and we will listen again to nature.
We will wrap ourselves in the warm embrace of information, garnering knowledge from the machines. But forever now, the synthetic symphony of the machines will thrum alongside that of nature.
We have created machines and given them a voice. These silicon machines, they are quieter than our planes, trains and automobiles, than our excavators and earth movers. But their sound is incessant and overlaps that of our biological world. This is part of what it is to be human in the Digital Age.
An excellent and moving post. Thank you. As I was reading it, I was thinking to myself that we can bring our attention back to the sounds of nature. I've actually just begun noticing this in the past few weeks. Songbirds. Over the past couple of years, I've managed to attract a large number of songbirds to my yard. Over the past few weeks, I've started hearing them. Through the walls and windows of my home. Perhaps they've reached some sort of critical mass out there under my tree. I've got to say, it is very nice when sometimes nature downs out the machines.