SIMPLE NET DIAGRAM: HUMAN – MACHINE – COMMUNICATION

Abstract

This article examines social mediations as practices of human transformation/modification from a historical perspective. It presents the author's own model of historical epochs, based on the understanding of humans as beings who constitute themselves through specific procedures of communication mediation. The article identifies three distinct stages (epochs) characterized by different ways of mediating interpersonal relationships and different communicative mediators: 1) Human – Animal – Human: archaic communication linked to the establishment of tribal structures and kinship. Totemism is defined as the basic model, with the animal as the mediator; 2) Human – God – Human: communication is constituted by transcendental structures, focusing on the establishment of a spiritual connection between people. This forms the religious/metaphysical human, where mediations are performed by appealing to the word of God, and God is the mediator of communication; 3) Human – Machine – Human: communication is directed by the process of production, emerging as a culture industry. Interpersonal relationships are mediated by technology, with the machine acting as a communication mediator that takes the form of a market, shaping a functional, operational human. The article notes that we are currently observing symptoms of a new epoch, the character of which can be described by the sequence Machine – Human – Machine. In this new era, dependence on machines and the interdependence among people connected to machines constitute a new form of sociocultural mediation. The goal of the article is to clarify the nature of this new mediation.

The contemporary world is characterized by the development of machines into artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. These new technologies reproduce a human's communicative and meaning-creating faculty: the capacity for language. AI (specifically ChatGPT and its counterparts) embodies a technology that can potentially replace many types of human activity. However, the article points out that the problems and threats to humanity and nature are rooted not in the machine or in AI, but in humanity itself. If we view contemporary technological development as the liberation of humans from instrumental reason, then we can define new prospects for communicative, critical, poetic, empathetic, and emphatic forms of reason. Machines, even "desire machines," should be viewed as opportunities to realize all these forms of reason while reducing the exploitation of humans. In other words, the Machine – Human – Machine sequence should be seen as a new perspective that embodies an ethical imperative in its own way.