I’m thinking about maps and artificial intelligence.
Not the way you think. I’m not talking about augmented reality or the return of Google Glass or geek fantasies of robot drone guides.
I’m talking about a good old-fashioned paper map.
Suppose you are lost in a strange city. An experience that ranges from disorienting to terrifying. (If you’ve had it, you know.) You are completely at the mercy of your surroundings.
Then somebody hands you a map. Let it be as crude as possible–small, detail-poor, torn. Nonetheless, you can suddenly orient yourself. Act like you know this place, to some extent. Find your way around.
What has happened here? Clearly, an encounter with information technology. An encounter, that is, with information as technology–that tool, that object, which you have attached to your being. The tool becomes, for the moment, the very vector of your being. Person-with-map is a cyborg. But that’s precisely how s/he attains the requisite functionality as a person.
And more than that. By acquiring the map, and starting to use it, you have acquired analytic abilities that were not yours before. You know where that street leads. Which way to the hospital. How to find a hotel. And so on. Mapless people, also lost in this city, can cling to you.
You have become smarter. Artificially.
Two points. One, the phenomenon of information is only ever encountered technologically–however creased, crude, or basic the tool in the encounter may be. “Information technology,” I guess, is itself becoming an old-fashioned phrase, and good riddance. It’s redundant. Technology is not all informational. But all information is technological.
And two: information technology is always artificial intelligence–again, no matter how simple or ungeeky the informational tool. This is why, I think, the horizon of the Singularity keeps receding. It’s not a transformation in our relationship to information. It is our relationship to information.
But it is we, not the map, who become AI.
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