The beauty of writing

There is a beauty in the way we use reason and develop the ways in which we communicate with each other. I've been thinking about how we interact nowadays. Take this text, for example: rendered on a screen, through a "cloud," on the internet, using a machine to enlarge, revise, and improve it... it's so common now that, when we stop to think about it, it becomes completely incomprehensible. At its core, it's about transforming energy into symbols and symbols into meaning.

This is nothing new, of course. Humans have been developing many tools, but I believe the central point for all of us, as a social species, is that we need each other to accomplish tasks, even when we automate them, and to be able to work together, we need to communicate.

Language arose from this need. And the first abstraction that followed was mathematics. First came language as a form of sound, then shared meaning, and eventually the understanding that knowledge could exist outside our brains. Increasingly, our ancestors realized that we needed something better, something with which we could interact with each other and transmit discoveries and knowledge. After thousands of years, we realized that inscriptions on stone were the best way to do this, to fix thought in matter, and this laid the foundation for the evolution of written information. Language itself began to be interpreted in ink, and we used images to describe things; images became symbols, symbols eventually became letters, and, evolutionary, we invented writing.

That powerful interface became our weapon against nature, against the unexpected , to discover the truth. Encoded laws, mapped the stars, and preserved memory itself.

Yes, we used and still use language as an interpreter, an interface, to transmit knowledge, and we were doing so well that now we communicate with machines. The same machines made of transistors, small, simple tools that open and close when we receive or don't receive power. We managed to create an interpretation for the states of the transistors, we used logic to name 0 and 1, and then we realized that by stacking enough transistors, we could join 0s and 1s to interpret them as words, eventually evolving to use the same words to perform tasks, solve mathematical problems, and then create small programs, a program to govern them, and increasingly more interfaces that build what we have today as our computers.

The beauty of a computer it’s strictness : It could not guess what we meant, so when we used written language to give it a instruction, we had to adapt it to be as strict as possible, to create the same result every time we probe the machine. We then created programming language, that strip down our own form of communication into a human-machine interface, to enforce determinism. And It was like this for decades.

And now, something has shifted

Now we create software that no longer requires the same rigid interface, another technology that transforms the way we interact with the computer. See ... we use these machines so much nowadays to store so much knowledge that we can now gather it all into one large file, run it on parallel hardware, and probe it! Not in a structured way, but using our natural language as instructions, and it can produce a response. We no longer communicate through symbols created exclusively for machines. We speak as we communicate with each other, and the machine responds.

We've moved from a deterministic approach to a probabilistic one. It doesn't follow structural rules, but transforms instructions into patterns learned by us. Written language becomes the main bridge. The same tool we used to preserve thought in stone, then on paper, and finally in code, we now use to invoke reasoning within a machine.

In a peculiar symbiotic way, we are allowing not only humans, but also machines, to interact with us and perform tasks necessary for us to achieve our goals. Now, we use our modern "cuneiform" writing to interact with a machine, and this interface can be interpreted and return something based on its probabilistic definition. It has never been so pleasurable to use written language, and this represents a shift in how we think about socialization, about being a social human being and interacting with one another.

We are back to the natural language era.


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Written by human , improved by AI

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