An arrowhead embeds thousands of years of human experience into a seemingly simple design. A book or a website allows us to embed an infinite range of human experiences in an artifact. Computer software allows us to embed “instructions” into devices so that we can execute those processes automatically at some later point.
We are constantly expanding the range of tacit human knowledge—and thus the scope of human experience—that we can embed in technology. We’ve gone from storing facts in clay tablets, books, and databases to using software instructions to imbue a kind of deferred human volition into our devices. Even intelligence once tightly bound in our biology, such as the ability to recognize faces and spoken words, now rests within machine learning systems. We are, in short, handing over more and more of what we know to machines.
We Don’t Know the Limits Machine Intelligence
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