ARAIEngineer

The Rise of Machines: A New Language-Game

It has often been said that we are entering the age of machines. But what does this mean? To say that machines have risen is not a statement about physical elevation or an increase in their size or shape. Rather, it is a reflection of a shift in our practices, in our way of interacting with the world, in the very language-games that form the structure of our reality.

The Problem of Meaning

When we speak of machines, we do not refer merely to those mechanical contraptions we once operated by hand—those early industrial machines of cogs, levers, and steam. No, the machines of which we now speak seem to possess something different. They are embedded with computation, learning, and decision-making. But to describe this as “learning” or “thinking” risks the confusion of meaning. Do machines really think, or do we merely extend this word from one context (human cognition) to another (algorithmic processing)?

Here lies a problem not of machines, but of language. For words, in their original form, arise from human activities, from the shared practices of our form of life. When we say that machines “learn,” we engage in a kind of metaphorical extension. But what is lost in this metaphor?

Wittgenstein reminds us: meaning is use. To understand what we mean by a machine’s rise, we must investigate how this language is used within our current form of life. It is not that machines have gained some essence of sentience. Rather, we have altered our practices such that machines now play a new role within them. Their rise is the rise of a new kind of relationship—a new way of doing things, of solving problems, of perceiving and interacting with the world.

The Transformation of Forms of Life

Consider the concept of a “form of life,” that basic substrate of human activities, practices, and language-games which ground our sense of meaning. In the age of machines, this form of life is undergoing transformation. The way we work, communicate, create, and even think is shaped by our interaction with digital tools, algorithms, and automated systems. The machine, once a tool of efficiency, has now become something more—a partner in our thinking, a companion in our decision-making, an extension of our own cognitive processes.

This partnership, however, creates a tension. For can we truly say we understand what these machines do? When a neural network identifies a pattern, when an algorithm makes a recommendation, when an AI composes a piece of music, where does human understanding enter the picture? Is it not the case that we are now often confronted with decisions and results that we ourselves cannot explain?

Our relationship with machines thus involves not just a new kind of use, but a new kind of opacity. We have extended the realm of the calculable far beyond our own comprehension. In doing so, we have entered a new form of life, one in which machines play roles we cannot fully grasp.

The Silence of the Machine

Wittgenstein once wrote, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” There is a profound silence at the heart of the machine. Machines do not speak in the way we do. They process, calculate, and execute, but they do not participate in the human language-game of meaning. And yet, we are tempted to ascribe to them the attributes of speech, of thought, of understanding.

This silence is not simply the absence of language, but the absence of a shared form of life. Machines do not share our world—they transform it, but they do not live within it as we do. To attribute “thought” or “intention” to a machine is to misrecognize the nature of our language-games. The machine operates according to its own logic, one that we have created but which exceeds us in its operations.

A New Logic

Perhaps what we are witnessing is not the rise of machines, but the rise of a new kind of logic—a logic of algorithms, data, and networks that operates alongside, but distinct from, the human world of meaning. This logic is foreign to us in many ways. It is not based on the understanding of words or the resolution of doubts, but on the brute processing of information, on probabilities and patterns that we may never fully see or understand.

Yet, we are drawn to it. The machines promise efficiency, power, and control. But they also carry with them a new kind of alienation, a detachment from the shared practices that once grounded our sense of reality.

What Can Be Said?

In the end, the rise of machines is not so much the dawn of a new form of life, but the extension of our current one into realms where our language begins to break down. We must be careful, then, in how we speak of machines. For in extending our language to them, we risk forgetting the very boundaries that give our words meaning. We risk losing sight of what it is to understand, to think, to act as humans.

The rise of the machines is, in truth, the rise of a new way of speaking—and with it, a new way of being. But as always, we must ask: in what form of life does this language take root? And how does it change the way we live, speak, and understand?

For what can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence!