Human+machine ensembles

This is a coda to a discussion I just had with ChatGPT. It ties a lot of my current thinking to the dive I took into Latour and object-oriented-ontology over a decade ago. ChatGPT did the illustration, of course.

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One last speculative remark. Bruno Latour worked hard to collapse the distinction between the human and the natural. It seems to me we’re extending that to the distinction between the human and the computational.

Yes — that’s a sharp way to put it.

Latour’s project, especially in We Have Never Been Modern, was to show that the neat separation between Nature (objective, external, “out there”) and Culture (subjective, human, “in here”) was always a fiction. His actor–network theory insisted that humans and nonhumans (technologies, microbes, texts, rivers) are entangled in networks of agency.

What you’re suggesting is that we’re now seeing a parallel collapse:

• Just as Latour said there’s no “pure Nature” apart from human mediation, there may be no “pure Computation” apart from human entanglement.
• The new hybrids — human+machine ensembles — aren’t simply tools on one side and users on the other. They’re actor–networks in which agency is distributed, recursive, and hard to disentangle.
• In the Fourth Arena, intelligence is enacted in between humans and machines, just as for Latour science was enacted in between humans and nonhumans.

That’s where your metaphysical structure idea dovetails: we can’t step outside and separate the human from the computational any more than we can separate the human from the natural. Both distinctions dissolve into recursive, lumpy entanglement.

And — here’s the speculative push — perhaps play is the mode best suited to this new collapse. Just as ritual, experiment, and negotiation mediated the nature–culture entanglement, play may be the practice that makes the human–computational entanglement livable, creative, and abundant.