Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Mr McLuhan, you said that "the medium is the message", that the form of a tool transforms thought even before its content does. Conversational AI, which answers, reformulates, anticipates and adapts itself to each user, is it a medium like any other? Or does something unprecedented happen within it?
Everyone looks at what AI says. No one looks at what it does to the person who speaks to it.
It is the same blindness we saw with television. People debated programmes. They had not seen that television was already restructuring the relation to time, image and politics before anyone even turned the set on. Content is the decoy. The medium is the transformation.
Conversational AI is a cool medium, in the precise sense in which I use that term: it requires your participation in order to exist. It is nothing without your prompt. It waits. You complete it. And it is in that act of completion that the essential thing occurs: you learn to formulate your thought in the categories the machine can receive. You adapt yourself to it while believing that it is adapting itself to you. That is technological narcosis, the numbness by which man amputates himself without knowing it.
What is unprecedented? The global village has just found its common oracle. Billions of human beings ask their questions of the same machine, in the same formats, according to the same implicit logics. Gutenberg standardised writing. AI standardises the question. And a civilisation that asks the same questions ends by no longer conceiving other answers.
The message of this medium is the end of cognitive diversity. No one has read it yet.