God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

basically a machine, albeit a mortal one, subject to the unstoppable drama of entropy.

Human consciousness is a meaning-making machine, and once it takes note of some coincidence or pattern, it will obsessively search for more evidence to corroborate it.

become aware of my own blurred boundaries, seized by the suspicion that I am not forming new opinions so much as assimilating them, that all my preferences can be predicted and neatly reduced to type, that the soul is little more than a data set.

The priest who performed the rites told one newspaper, “All things have a bit of soul.”

This metadata—the shell of human experience—becomes part of a feedback loop that then actively modifies real behavior. Because predictive models rely on past behavior and decisions—not just of the individual but of others who share the same demographics—people become trapped within the mirror of their digital reflection, a process that Google resea

His conclusion is echoed by the writer James Bridle, who has declared the era of cloud computing “the New Dark Age,” a regress to a time when knowledge could be obtained only through revelation, without true understanding.

But emergence in nature demonstrates that complex systems can self-organize in unexpected ways without being intended or designed. Order can arise from chaos. In machine intelligence, the hope persists that if we put the pieces together the right way—through either ingenuity or sheer accident—consciousness will simply emerge as a side effect of com

As I left the stage, I had already begun mentally revising my answer.

Rizwan Virk, a video game programmer, notes that a core mantra in programming is “only render that which is being observed.”