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AI is not a horse
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Metaphors matter. They create mental models, mental models breed tools, and tools shape the world. So choose your AI metaphor carefully.
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Master-Slave is the default frame today: we command, it obeys, we fear the reversal. But flipping the roles doesn't change the relationship.
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Pet or horse is warmer — autonomy, partnership, riding to the intellectual horizon together. Lovely. Also unlikely: horses demand conscious respect, effort, love, sustained at scale. Progress rarely works that way.
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Progress is about doing more things without thinking about them. So the honest metaphor must involve collaboration we're barely aware of.
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AI as microbiome. What gut bacteria do for our biology, AI can do for our information metabolism. Call it the databiome.
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Like microbes, it would be diverse, personal, protective, occasionally dangerous — helping us digest memes, filter attention, and, crucially, forget.
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Whose microbiome, though? An individual's. A company's. A nation's. Perhaps the Noosphere's — the databiome that finally wakes Gaia up.
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We'll never know, just as my red blood cells will never know I'm typing this on a planet-sized network.
Original published: January 17, 2023