“We come into this world with the innate abilities to learn how to interact with other sentient beings. Suppose you had to interact with other people by writing little messages to them. It would be a real pain. That’s how we interact with computers. It’s much easier to talk to them. It’s just so much easier if the computer can understand what we’re saying.” –Geoffrey Hinton, Google computer scientist

Soon, computers will feel more like companions, like a part of us, or a part of our environment. We will interact with many computing systems and their sensors at every moment, as many of us already do. For even with the limited cloud computing of today, we have already begun conversations with persistent and networked systems that remember things about us we have already forgotten.

As we talk more often to and through computers–and as they talk back–we would be foolish not to consider how our speaking, writing, thinking, and behavior will change. We should expect, for example, that gradually our discourses, and so our thinking, will take on amplified features of spoken, not written, communication; features such as parallel terms, phrases, clauses; also antithetical terms, phrases, clauses, and “epithets,” or fixed, preconstructed forms of conversation and visual expression.

Fixed expressions in these more oral and visual ways of knowing will necessarily bind the depth and range of human thought more tightly than in our static, print-based culture of today, for better and for worse.

The constraints of speech and visual expression will render us more coherent to others, and to other computing systems. This will be an upshot for some.

In ancient, pre-literate, oral cultures of the past, continuity and coherence in languaging across time would have required repetition of information, so that it could be recalled, but also recognized as relevant. The ritualistic language systems of the future should also lend themselves to this same simplicity of expression and thought, a lack of sophistication (in exchange for a kind of “practicalness” and efficiency), and a command-based, goal-driven worldview.

Also, because computers can “know” vastly more than humans, some equilibrium in our shared human/computer knowledge-base will have to be achieved; if not, human beings will have to be dramatically upgraded. For example, consider that if humans were to leave themselves unaugmented, computer systems would need to slough off or “forget” increasingly more of what’s been deemed irrelevant to us, for fear of overwhelming us with raw data.

But how is this relevancy to be determined?

Conversely, we should expect that our human classificatory systems for information will tend to become increasingly non-syllogistic and unsystematic. Oral and visual modes of learning, while great for some kinds of learning, do not allow for the sustained reflection or critical insight that reading and writing have afforded, since their contributions are gone the moment they are spoken, heard, or seen.

Human consciousness is not a thing that can be “reversed”, but human beings will change in fundamental ways as we continue to shift from a primarily text-based mode of understanding to more secondarily-oral and visual modes. Some of these changes can be glimpsed by hypothesizing a primarily-oral culture (as Walter Ong did), then attending to the necessary features, estimating similarities, and extrapolating as I have tried to do here.

We should expect that, within these future networks, strict definition, comprehensive account, or probing self or critical analysis will be resisted, because of the natural limits of oral discourse and audio/visual (holographic?) playback themselves, and more likely dismissed as dysfunctional.