The Machine is Running

It has been a year since I posted anything here. I have been running through the original posts and ideas with a goal of re-writing them to sanitize all the AI slop and put my own voice to it. I decided not to update the date of the posts with the over-writes because this blog has not been read by anyone other than me afaik. The concepts are the same, just the content tweaks that come from removing nonsense.

It's been humbling to realize that I'm a worse writer than an LLM. Hopefully more readable, and less generic, but definitely not with the strength of voice I want. I'm going to re-write 4 more posts as an attempt to solidify the ideas I started 1-year ago. Here goes.

E.M. Forster wrote The Machine Stops in 1909. A civilization has retreated underground. All experience is mediated through a vast, humming system that delivers information, instruction, and connection. People sit in hexagonal rooms and talk to each other through screens. They lecture. They receive ideas. They are comfortable and certain and almost entirely cut off from the surface of the earth.

Kuno, a young man, has been to the surface. He has felt the grass and the wind and the overwhelming, unclassifiable texture of direct experience. He tries to tell his mother what it was like.

She cannot receive it. The Machine has no language for what he is describing (Forster imagined a future where video calls were not direct recordings but encoded captures - so the concepts described by her son had to be understood and exchanged between locations, not recorded and transmitted). She trusts the Machine over her son, because the Machine is authoritative and Kuno is just one person. What he is describing does not fit any of the categories she has been given.

Forster called what Kuno encountered and could not transmit the imponderable bloom, the quality of direct experience that resists formalization. That phrase is the name of this blog. It is the thing I keep thinking about. It is the thing that I hope truly exists and will be named and valued by society as a reaction to the rise of large language models.

This past year I have been reading more carefully around the ideas this blog was trying to explore. Philosophy of knowledge. Engineering ethics. The question of what expert practitioners actually know, and what happens when we start outsourcing that knowing to systems that have never been to the surface.

What I found is that there is a body of thought that addresses exactly these questions. Miranda Fricker on epistemic injustice. Donald Schön on the reflective practitioner. Michael Polanyi on tacit knowledge. Hubert Dreyfus on what machines still cannot do. These are not obscure texts. They are just not widely read in engineering practice.

Over the next several posts I want to work through what I've been reading and thinking while using Forster as the frame, because I still think The Machine Stops is the most precise diagnosis of our current moment that exists.

The topics ahead:

• What the Machine cannot transmit: tacit knowledge, heuristics, and the imponderable bloom
• Who gets believed: epistemic injustice and the credibility of machines
• The concepts we don't have yet: hermeneutical injustice and the frozen horizon
• Going to the surface: what engineering ethics and society requires now

If any of this sounds like your kind of thinking, I am glad you are here.

The Machine is already running.

Next: What the Machine Cannot Transmit; The Imponderable Bloom and the different types of knowing