Rethinking communication in the age of intelligent machines

Article by Massimo Berlingozzi – “Rethinking communication in the age of intelligent machines” – April 2020_UNIVERSE CONSULTING_HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

“THERE ARE MORE STARS IN THE UNIVERSE than grains of sand on earth”.

When astronomer Carl Sagan uttered that sentence it was 1980, nobody then could imagine creating something capable of defying those numbers.
With Big Data, we have succeeded and this data continues to grow, not least because we are no longer the only ones producing it.
In fact, the amount of information generated and managed by machines (machine to machine – M2M) is constantly increasing, so in the near future we will no longer be the protagonists of this process.
Is this passage worth reflecting on? Let us try to throw a pebble in the pond, dredging up an admirable (prophetic?) statement by Thomas Eliot: ‘Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, where is the knowledge we have lost in information? “.
But let us go in order.
Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and ethics of information at Oxford, has repeatedly addressed this issue, and in his bookThe Fourth Revolution explains how the digital age has caused us to lose even the last primacy, that of information.
Copernicus ousted man from the centre of the universe, Darwin forced us to abandon the idea of being something different from the rest of evolution, Freud explained through the unconscious that the ego is no longer master in its own house.
Floridi attributes the paternity of this latest mutation to Alan Turing, the English mathematician who pioneered computer science and devised the test of the same name to distinguish a computer from a human being.
What are the consequences of this umpteenth wound inflicted on our egos?
And does this have anything to do with having to rethink the true value of communication in the midst of the transformations of the digital age?
Sometimes small examples help more than big explanations: the example in question concerns a curious acronym, apparently neutral, capable at best of causing minor annoyances.
Its name is captcha.
It is those images, or distorted letters, that are offered to us to prove that we are ‘not a robot’ when we register on a website.
The English language version with the phrase ‘Confirm Humanity’ explains the problem even better.
The usefulness of such systems is well known, yet there is something paradoxical about this situation.
We probably do not think about it at the time, but we are faced with a machine asking us to prove to it that we are human.
Essentially a reverse Turing test, so much so that, if we unravel the acronym, we discover that captcha stands for: Completely Automated Public Turing-test-to-tell Computers and Human Apart. A child of a few years is capable of recognising the traffic lights or butterflies proposed by those images, yet this is the ability required of us to prove that we are not a computer. We are well aware that a machine, properly trained, would be able to solve the problem, but it is precisely in this widespread and natural ability to contextualise elements of meaning that one of the important qualities of human intelligence lies.
As the American philosopher John Searle, known for his studies on the ‘philosophy of mind’, well explains,”the machine has only a ‘syntactic’ competence in combining symbols; it does not, however, possess a ‘semantic’ competence, which is indispensable for attributing meaning to the symbols on which it is operating.”
This is what Luciano Floridi calls, with a felicitous expression, ‘semantic capital’, attributing to this peculiarity of human beings a central role in identifying the skills of the future.
Faced with machines that are capable of manipulating and managing information better than we are, it is therefore crucial to understand where to look in order to enhance the work of the future.
The realisation that communication is not resolved in the simple passing of information is the important legacy of studies on the pragmatics of communication, which have helped us to understand that ‘grammar of relationships’ that is essential to be able to strategically manage relationships between people within organisations.
After all, there would be no point in talking about soft skills without this awareness.
Rethinking communication therefore means always reminding ourselves that the deepest value of human experience lies in the enormous emotional, symbolic and cultural reservoir we have at our disposal through words, and in the infinite semantic nuances present in the many languages we have today.