19 August

40 years ago Bruno Latour suggested that we think much more with our eyes and hands, than we do with our brains. Because thought itself has never happened ‘in’ the brain. It’s always been a distributed activity, across a network of material practices, themselves part of social relationships. AI is just the latest extension of that distributed process, a natural evolution of it. Thought and consciousness have always been ‘artificial’. The extent to which AI bothers us is the extent to which we hold fantastical, impossible ideas about thinking and the brain. There’s nothing ‘in’ the brain. That metaphor is another symptom of how we don’t understand space. No images, no memories, no thinking. It’s just a lump of networked, electrified meat. But networked to the world around it, which produces all of those things we assume happen inside our heads. https://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/21-DRAWING-THINGS-TOGETHER-GB.pdf