A McLuhan Maelstrom: When the Reach of Extensions Exceeds Our Grasp | Part One
McLuhan calls the media “extensions of man” because they each increase the range and power of one part of the human body. In so doing, they effect a modification of consciousness by altering the ratio between the various senses and faculties. His definition of a medium is broad: he devotes twenty-six separate chapters [in Understanding Media] not only to such obvious media as paper, print, telegraph, and radio, but also to wheels, weapons, clocks, money, and houses. — Neil Compton
Glenn Deir of St. John’s, Newfoundland, a retired CBC journalist, had an inoperable tumor on his tonsils. The tumor was part of a resurgence of cancerous material, which left Deir facing his second major bout with cancer, as the tumor also extended to the back of his tongue.
To remove the cancerous tumor, doctors would have to delicately cut the tonsil, tongue, and throat, a procedure that didn’t have any volunteers lining up to take a swing at it, Deir explained in a CBC First Person article.
Deir’s only hope, came in the form of an extension of human hands, the da Vinci surgical robot, whose “fingers” are capable of reaching where a human hand cannot.
“It was more complicated than [Dr. Corsten] anticipated. The previous radiation had made the tonsil stiff; it didn’t pull away easily. The tumor on my tongue was the size of a large cherry. He also had to rotate a muscle to close a gap in my throat. I woke up with a feeding tube up my nose and an incision that ran the full length of my neck,” Deir explained.
But the surgery was a success, and Deir’s tumor was removed, leaving him to learn to talk again after having his tongue, throat, and tonsil cut. Without the da Vinci robot, Dr. Corsten said they would have had to cut his jaw in two to reach the tumor and remove it by hand.
In this anecdote, we see things and extensions.
There are untold things in the world, many of them sold on Amazon. When I order fountain pen ink on Amazon, Noodler’s Dark Matter is a thing. In his medical history Glenn Deir’s tumor was a thing. The Amazon monitoring software is an extension of human eyes (spotting the ink) and brains (knowing where the ink is at any given time). The DaVinci robot is an extension of human hands.
Deir’s surgery is an example of humans interacting with extensions of humans (known in software parlance, as systems) that determine the fate of humans as well as other things. The role of extensions in our lives is a new unexplored reality.
How to Think About Extensions
When we think of extensions, we might think of an extension cord, maybe a firefighter’s extension ladder. We don’t typically think of media or tools like AI as extenders. But these tools are extensions of human senses just like the DaVinci robot; they extend perception beyond stimuli coming from outside or inside the body. A hearing aid extends what the ear can hear; binoculars extend what the eye can see. So, thinking of tools as extensions — McLuhan called them extensions of man — is a new way of looking at and thinking about tools and their effect on us.
The key to extensions is awareness that they have two modes. They can stay connected to us: eyeglasses extend eyesight capabilities but they stay on our faces and are useless to us (or most anyone else) if they are nowhere near us. And an extension can also be disconnected from us, which enables the extension to live another life, serve other purposes. When this happens, I call this extension an artifact.
For example, an x-ray (extension-artifact) of your liver might show cirrhosis. This x-ray in a doctor’s hands could be used to improve your life expectancy. But in an employer’s hands, or the hands of an employer’s insurance company, it could be used to paint you as an employment risk (heavy drinker). Our extensions can — and do — cut a number of ways.
With that in mind, I want to focus on the surprising other life of disconnected extensions.
Things and Extensions
Extensions can now take on a life of their own. A mere social security number can empty a bank account or send a criminal to prison. These extensions are everywhere today and are highly useful in supply chains and cell phones and iPads and manufacturing assembly lines; these proxies for humans manage stock exchange data and via algorithmic trading can make trades that rock global markets. Human life has been enhanced immeasurably by extensions of what was once only (carbon-based) human activity. For example, reading mammograms with the help of AI software — extensions of human eyes and brains — found 20% more cancers than the routine double reading by two different radiologists and didn’t increase false positives, according to a Swedish study published in The Lancet Oncology.
The efficiency and productivity of extensions unleash huge innovation possibilities. While we’re building extensions of human capabilities it will serve us well to probe the logic of extensions. This is important because our extensions are accelerating in quantity and influence.
To that end, let’s dig deeper into the extension of artificial intelligence. The logic of AI is revealing.
AI is designed to capture and compile, then mimic or echo, human expression and human behavior. After AI is “trained” on humans by collecting thousands of instances of human expression and behavior, AI then reformulates that expression and behavior in an extension (i.e., Google Bard) presented as an interface topic, question, prompt, etc. This echoing of human thinking can seem like human thinking.
AI ‘brainpower’ is greater than the human brain and is designed to sort and reframe all human knowledge to make it accessible to humans. AI feeds accumulated human knowledge through a user interface, making knowledge a commodity like gold or natural gas, accessible to anyone who uses the AI interface, effectively an extension of human intelligence. A new logic emerges: knowledge no longer resides solely in one mind, one person, or one group.
Even though AI is trained on humans in order “to learn to do anything a human can do” — faster, more precisely, more consistently, and with increasing accuracy — AI operates with a different logic. AI, a fully disconnected extension, accelerates learning, so with warp speed we have access to knowledge, facts, understanding. Giving us these powers, AI uses a collective human mind, having learned from thousands of human minds; it also operates at speeds many times what an individual human can manage. Doing so, AI “occupies a different ‘mental’ plane from humans”:
The advent of AI obliges us to confront whether there is a form of logic that humans have not achieved or cannot achieve, exploring aspects of reality we have never known and may never directly know. — The Age o f AI, Kissinger, Schmidt, Huttenlocher
AI will eventually “train” AI. The greatest opportunities — and fears — for AI lie in its ability to process information and learn from it, developing beyond-human insights, moves, strategies, or plans — thereby causing unprecedented avenues for innovation and abuse.
This would be a textbook example of an extension separating from the human(s) who birthed it.
And quantum computing will soon accelerate AI advances.
Quantum computing will … amplify the power of AI in many fields ….
AI and quantum computing are extensions of the human mind as the da Vinci robot is an extension of human hands. As a species we are very good at making extensions. But that is not our only role. We can stand back, pause a moment to see where we are, and assess the extension landscape.
There’s a lot to see.
