The Atomic Human

Neil D. Lawrence

2024-07-10

AI in Education

The Atomic Eye, by slicing away aspects of the human that we used to believe to be unique to us, but are now the preserve of the machine, we learn something about what it means to be human.


bits/min	billions	2000	6
billion calculations/s	~100	a billion	a billion
embodiment	20 minutes	5 billion years	15 trillion years

This can be disturbing to humans because we are used to a low bandwidth communication rate.

The trinity of human, data, and computer, and highlights the modern phenomenon. The communication channel between computer and data now has an extremely high bandwidth. The channel between human and computer and the channel between data and human is narrow. New direction of information flow, information is reaching us mediated by the computer. The focus on classical statistics reflected the importance of the direct communication between human and data. The modern challenges of data science emerge when that relationship is being mediated by the machine.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn

Consider the six-word novel, apocryphally credited to Ernest Hemingway, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”. To understand what that means to a human, you need a great deal of additional context. Context that is not directly accessible to a machine that has not got both the evolved and contextual understanding of our own condition to realize both the implication of the advert and what that implication means emotionally to the previous owner.

Ernest Hemingway’s apocryphal six-word novel would mean nothing to a computer.

Bill Phillips and his MONIAC (completed in 1949). The machine is an analogue computer designed to simulate the workings of the UK economy.

The trinity of human, data, and computer, and highlights the modern phenomenon. The communication channel between computer and data now has an extremely high bandwidth. The channel between human and computer and the channel between data and human is narrow. New direction of information flow, information is reaching us mediated by the computer. The focus on classical statistics reflected the importance of the direct communication between human and data. The modern challenges of data science emerge when that relationship is being mediated by the machine.

The HAM now sits between us and the traditional digital computer.

The Atomic Human (Lawrence, 2024).

book: The Atomic Human
twitter: @lawrennd
The Atomic Human pages atomic human, the 13 , baby shoes 368, MONIAC 232-233, 266, 343, human-analogue machine (HAMs) 343-347, 359-359, 365-368.
podcast: The Talking Machines
newspaper: Guardian Profile Page
blog: http://inverseprobability.com

Lawrence, N.D., 2024. The atomic human: Understanding ourselves in the age of AI. Allen Lane.

The Atomic Human Neil D. Lawrence 2024-07-10 AI in Education