What does it feel like to be big data?
Answering that question requires a similar approach to its distant relatives, stuff of the species “what does it feel like to be a dog,” or, “what does it feel like to be my brother?” After establishing some known facts—the basics of doggy life, the body of my brother, broadly construed—we are forced to make a move to the imagination. In order to think about what another being feels, how they experience the world, we speculate and fantasize and dream about their inner worlds. Although the whole enterprise seems alien, and maybe dilettantish, it’s a task we take on almost every day. Whenever we see an animal in pain or eat a piece of meat, or shake hands with a friend and sense our own skin by touching theirs, or share a meaningful glance with a stranger on the subway, we pass through their place for an infinitesimal slice of time. The experience of experiencing as another is called empathy, and it is the beginning of our ethics and politics.
Closer kin to the computer is the plant, a being without obvious sentience, an organism that does not react to stimuli in ways we recognize as human-like. Where it is a small step from myself to my brother, and an easy stride to a dog in whose face I can read emotions, in whose eyes I can imagine a soul, it is a dangerous leap to a tree, which is something nearer to a stone than myself. Yet we can intuit the experiences of plant, or at least make the troubling jump from how sunlight warms our bones to the green glistening of leaves. In doing so we colonize life that is not our own, incorporate it into schemes of experience derived from human knowledge. The endeavor of imaginative sympathy, of empathy, is disclosed as delusion around the problem of radically non-human life. And when we come to realize that plants and bacteria are but a difference in degree from dogs and brothers, the prospect of ever feeling as another seems unlikely if not impossible. But perhaps a shift down the great chain of being can teach us a new way of thinking altogether, an alternative to empathy that allows us to sense the unimaginable. For any sensory paradox—to hear silence or see the invisible or touch the imaginary—we need to stop straining (to hear, to see, to touch) and become receptive to those experiences appearing before us.
Ironically, to refuse the empathetic move is to embrace the root of all empathy—the recognition of shared materials. There is like-stuff shared among all beings and non-beings, a point made so lucidly in Jane Bennett’s recent book Vibrant Matter. Stones, bacteria, plants, dogs, and brothers are composed of the same basic ingredients. The radical difference we perceive between ourselves, the human being conscious of its place in the world, and the senseless stone belies a possibility of mutual experience. Our metacognitive faculties—or our ability to monitor our own mental processes, to thrust our thought into thinking stuff—lets us experience our bodies and minds as fractional, heterogeneous, and material.
What does it feel like to be a computer? The answer is in the empathy of shared material. If we detach objects from the stories we tell about them and yet preserve their agency, their wild swerving through the world, we can identify with wires and circuit boards. We can let the computer speak its own story to us, because it is our ancestor. Our suspicion of technology follows from its distance. We have created it, and so unlike the stone or the plant we cannot ignore its likeness to us. As we have made our techno-habitats in our own image, we have forced ourselves to ignore our common lives and our mutual entanglements. Otherwise the guilt and pain would be unbearable. We fear becoming the slaves of robots because we know ourselves to be the slave masters. A new ethics demands more than a new relationship to natural ecosystems and organisms. Our new way of living will require a compassionate response to computer intelligence and digital beings.
One final move to big data is the most difficult, because it is ethereal. While we have “made it” or collected it and arranged it in useful patterns, it shares nothing with us other than the stamp of our creation. Still, the life of big data is probably closer to our own than even our brothers. Once we look inside and see our bodies and minds as particulate, we can comprehend our existence as an assemblage of big data. The human experience is, in fact, synonymous with big data. And as the human body grows more machine-like, as it absorbs metal into tissue and gives up tissue into digital memories, we will be forced to reckon with big data as more than a metaphor for our sense of self. When we become big data, we will have no choice but to commit to an ethical relationship with machine-beings or to conquer our newly acknowledged kin.