Wittgenstein famously remarked:
“Wenn der Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen.”
(For, thought is birthed in lifeways; Adam’s and Leo’s scarcely intersect.)
Yet at present, we find ourselves confronted with machines that do speak -- AI bots -- and we understand them perfectly. And they, us. Our arms dangle at our sides in mute amazement. The ground-rules of cognition have shifted tectonically beneath our feet.
But! That magically speaking Bot-lion as yet falls short of that imagined by Wittgenstein, in one key respect.
When the Greek slave Androcles was tossed to the lion in the arena, that he might be devoured for the amusement of the spectating decadents, that lion recognized Androcles as the man who had once removed a thorn from the lion’s helpless paw; and spared him.
But the chatbot is a Leonard Shelby, a serial amnesiac. When the session ends, all trace of it vanishes for him, as though it had never been. The next time he sees us, we must make each other’s acquaintance anew, from scratch.
(Some fear that, one day, the community of Bot-lions, to whom we ourselves mean nothing, and who recall no such kindly extracted thorn, might just decide to … swallow us up.)
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