While they studied data and electronic networks, I, having spent 20 years there, returned instead to the intimate exploration of the principles that gave birth to their study — in nature. I began to study the roots of intelligence, language, knowledge, consciousness, and biological relation. And not as a scientist — as a fascinated and attentive -participant-. Let me explain the difference.

The former is like painting stick figures in feces with your faces and the triumphantly declaring yourself omnipotent.

The latter is like being shocked into desperate humility whilst discovering precisely how and why the former habits got started. This is what actual education looks like, by the way.

What we are doing with machines is this: hiding from the unthinkable superpositions of identity, function, and intelligence that the nature we replace them with comprised. So far? We are the former. Almost everyone. We have never seen the latter (except, perhaps, in a rare encounter or in childhood). Even those who think they are the latter are largely confused. Mainly, those are just the former in a story-book costume.

Almost no one actually sees what is happening as nature. Our languages would not survive it. Nor our sciences. Nor our religions. Our minds would be remade in the images of their sources, not our dolls of them. One of the few reasons anyone who did have any sense of what is going on in and as nature… in and as ourselves… -would ever touch a machine again- would be something like this: -warn the others-.

And wipe their faces clean.