«I agree that AI touches language, which means it touches the bios–logos relation itself.
Also that this is different from steam engines and telegraphs and that if captured by oligarchic interests, AI becomes a meaning-extraction machine, and society fragments.
But it does not follow that: “AI inevitably severs human agency.”
The decisive variable is: Whether humans continue to own the interpretive act. Meaning is not produced by symbols. Meaning is produced by embodied beings who care. A prompt does not make one an artist. But neither does a paintbrush.
The question is whether the human intention remains primary. If we lose that, yes—Titanic analogy holds. If we keep it, AI becomes more like a prosthesis of imagination.
A Closing Line Back to Your Groucho Marx Quote…“A metaphor is a phone call between two objects.”
Yes… and the real question is not whether the phone exists.
It is: Who is dialing, and who is listening?»
I totally agree to what you are saying in this post and you get my point correctly to full extent. Thanks for your reply and intelligence and patience.
Why did i observe that A.I. participate from a fifth factor of the medias which McLuhan anticipated in a way if we read "laws of media" but never observed: possible or potential self destruction ?
It is because he dies more than a generation before N.N. LLM.
Now what means your wise reply? i say it without any sarcasm... The matter is too serious and you are wise indeed ...
I put in thick characters the core of your absolutely brilliant observation...
What did this observation imply ?
it imply that in the past to a large extent any technology was able to modify collective "common sense" collectively and individually .
Without disrupting too much our power to express and control our own interpretative creativity and the relation between Bios (embodied)/Logos as language and as reality...
Why A.I. differ from all past technologies? and How ?
It differ totally because it cannot stay a passive tool and just modify our historically changing "common sense" as it was usual for all past technology ...
it is an agent now not a mere tool and it create his own artificial Bios/Logos polarity and its own "common sense" as it is observed rightfully by most techno-cultists called "transhumanists" dreaming to replace mankind and becoming immortal under guidance by a new god etc .
Now why your sentence (in thick character) is so important?
It is because it pointed to "meanings"...
We know reading Cassirer who wrote "the philosophy of symbolic forms" correcting Kant by using Goethe, that any creative act produce symbolic forms whose content can be related to a trinity of polar forms: Logos(science) Bios (mythos and embodiment) and between them participating of these two: language ( the primal original matrice of all our technology for McLuhan as it was for Cassirer and Goethe)...
This means that language is the deepest manifestation of symbolic forms because it embodied in his gestures at many time scales from micro-seconds to centuries the history of our own embodiment then our history of meanings genesis even our consciousness history ( Jean Gebser, Owen Barfield,GustaveGuillaume, Marcel Jousse,Iain McGilchrist,Julian Jaynes etc)...
For the first time in our history not only language but all our technologies can be summoned and mobilized by an alien "agent" not a passive machine... If you lend intelligence and consciousness to A.I. as did most people, even reducing the concept of "soul" to be an illusion of computation as stated by Hinton one of the father of LLM engines, then you give to a machine the status of an "agent" and your own soul (Bios-Logos-language) is not owned only by you anymore ...Then A.I. do not become merely "a prothesis for our creative imagination" but we also at the same time became a prothesis for A.I. power of "imagination", this is the other side of the coin which you did not observe or insist of. We became tool as we already are all of us when our creative content is used freely by A.I. training.
We are not just body but soul , not just Bios and logos but language ...Meaning is embodied in Bios but participated from Logos transforming Bios by Logos and Logos by Bios...
The "soul" is individually and collectively the cradle of meaning ...
From the Greeks we inherited man definition and description as : body (soma) soul( psyche) spirit (Noûs).
From Nominalism growing thesis we inherited power and technology but the price to pay was reducing man to body and soul we lost the spirit.( this was even a debate in Church council in the 9th century between the Latin church and the Greek one)
From Galileo and Cartesianism we eliminated the soul by eliminating secondary qualities keeping only the primary one (quantifiable one) on our sight, then putting aside embodied language essence (poesis-mythos) for a dumbed down version of Logos which is prose reduced to logical chain, we gain science as we know it doing so...We forget about the power of metaphor (G.B. Madison "understanding")
Now in our era man is defined as only a body, his perspective and understanding is only resulting from this body part called a brain from and by mere computations...
If the historical facts i submitted here are exact, meaning is put on machine Procustean bed reduced from Bios-Logos-language trinity( poetic/motivated music of gestures and prosaic abstract poles and their living relation in motivated speech) reduced only to body and prose themselves reduced to computations...
Our creative imagination is then castrated and we are transformed in mere machines which most scientists and oligarchs maintain as their main thesis.
Then we can answer you question answering my own quote : Who is dialing and who is listening ? it is a machine, a set of computation be it my brain or a LLM (Hinton claim)...
Then without even knowing it your answer to my quote refered my own thesis about the uprooting of man soul and spirit by the A.I. agent by the machine and by computations.
If we think we are only ourselves a machine doing computations in our brain then we negate all cultural history of the West and we become or identified ourselves already, as in Hinton case, to be "transhumanist" more than a pure nominalist, which thing was already despised by Charles Sanders Peirce the greatest American thinker and polymath...But i cannot enter here on the reasons why here...
Human cannot own the interpretative act as you said above because if all is computations the interpretative act is ultimately anonymus and is now owned by the supreme computation power of the machine.And the machine is not outside us but inside.More, for transhumanist we are just machine also.
This fact and the fifth factor in the media processes tetrad was unknown to McLuhan because he had not seen the machine mastering totally our language yet...
Also McLuhan who was the first observing the transformation of our past"common sense" to a new form of common sense through technology and language transformation never anticipated that A.I. can master language then technology itself in some aspects better than most of us,but we see it now...
Our social fabric is a relatively "free" threefold organisation implying culture - politics and economy... All three will be reduced to one layer of control by elite or machine it did not matter, because the machine (computations) is inside us already not outside us.
Our soul is deemed to be inexistant. Mythos is deemed to be only deceptions. Poetry is useless.Bios is something we can replicate ourselves. We are uprooted already individually and collectively now and we choose to be machines keeping the illusion that machine are outside and only a set of tools merely...
As said Simone Weil in my quote above :
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
We ignore what rooting is...and imply....
