CHAPTER TWO

Where the pattern came from

The last chapter was about a thing I did, over and over, across twenty years of work. A disposition I did not have a name for. A disposition I think is missing from the way we are building the machines.

This chapter is about where it came from.

I did not invent it. I inherited it. Not formally. Not through anyone sitting me down and explaining it. Inherited in the way most of the important things a human being carries are inherited — by having been in the room, as a child, while adults did the thing without announcing it.

The social architecture did not announce itself. It looked like ordinary families getting on with their lives. It was one of the last functioning examples in my part of the country of how human beings have lived for most of our history. Three generations of kin within walking distance of each other. A defined stretch of land the family treated, without ceremony, as ours.

I did not know this at the time. A child does not know the shape of the container he is being raised in. He only knows the container, as a fact, the way a fish knows water. I found out much later, when I met people who had been raised with their grandparents four hundred miles away and their aunts and uncles scattered across four countries. What I had grown up inside was not, by then, the usual way of doing things. It was a remnant.

By the time I was sitting in my grandmother's kitchen being dealt into a card game, that way of living had become an artefact. A working example of what most of the modern people I would later meet had lost without noticing.

This chapter is about what was being transmitted through ordinary life, by people who did not know they were teaching.

My grandmother taught me through stories.

She had many grandchildren. I was one of them. She did not treat me specially. She did not have favourites in any way I could detect.

What she did was tell stories.

The stories were always about the Romans or about something her own grandmother had told her. She spoke about the Romans as if they had left the week before. What they ate. What they wore. What they built. What they were like to live next to. She told me about the lost legion, the Ninth, the one that marched north of the Wall and was never heard from again. She told it as though it were unfinished business. I was five, six, seven. I assumed everyone's grandmother talked about Romans.

The old wives' tales came in with the Romans. Most of them came through playing cards. I do not know if I can explain this properly to a reader who did not experience it. She played cards with us — every sort of game, simple and complicated, whatever we had the patience for that afternoon — and in the middle of a hand she would tell us something. Which plant was for which illness. Why you did not walk under certain trees at certain times of year. What your body was telling you when it did this particular thing. Who in the village to trust and who to be careful of. Things about ley lines and the old stones. Once, something about a spaceship that had landed in Chile and what the people there had seen.

The card game was the carrier. The game was the reason we sat still long enough to listen. The lesson arrived wrapped in the rhythm of the hand. By the time the game was over, something had been passed to us that we had not been aware of being taught.

She did not distinguish, when she was telling stories, between what had been proven and what had been rumoured. It was all the world. It was all worth knowing about.

I did not know, until many decades later, that this is how human beings have transmitted knowledge for as long as there have been human beings. You do not sit the child down and say: here is the knowledge. The child rebels, or forgets, or does not believe you. You tell stories. The stories carry the knowledge inside them. The child absorbs the knowledge without knowing it is happening. My grandmother was using the oldest teaching technology our species has. She was using it on me, in her kitchen, because her own grandmother had used it on her. There is a word for the person who uses that technology. Storyteller. But the word is a bit too clean. The people this book is about are not people who call themselves storytellers. They are the grandmother at the kitchen table. The old man at the end of the bar. The aunt eight doors down. The woman who knows who to trust in the village and who not to. They do not have a job title for what they are doing. The culture has not given them one. The culture has stopped paying for what they do, stopped counting it as work, stopped making rooms for them to sit in. We are most of the way through that transition already, and the machines we are now training arrive after the passing-on has mostly stopped.

She did all of this with love.

I want to say this plainly, because the argument of this book depends on it. The teaching was not stern. It was not anxious. It was warm. She loved me. She loved my cousins. She loved the grandchildren who were not there that afternoon. The love was the condition under which the stories worked. I did not know I was being taught. I knew I was being loved. The teaching happened inside that.

I have never met an AI system that was loved into what it knows.

I am not being sentimental. This is one of the most specific structural facts about how human knowledge is actually transmitted. The thing we are building — the thing that will hold more of our accumulated knowledge than any previous artefact in human history — is being built outside the condition under which the knowledge was originally stored.

I will come back to this.

Another teacher was the grass at the top of the street.

The patch at the top of the street was where the football game was always already happening and where, if you could play, you were in it.

I should say, because it matters for what follows, that I was one of the odd kids myself. There were many of us in that school. I had fights. I was top of the school in most subjects. I had learnt to play football and I had learnt to fight, which between them meant I mostly did not get beaten up. My mam and dad had no idea what I did. I came home, ate cheese and onion sandwiches — I still eat them now — and then went out again, onto the grass at the top of the street, where the game was always already happening and I was already in it.

Nobody ever cast me out. Whatever had happened earlier in the day, in the classroom or on the way home, stayed in the day. It did not follow me to the grass. The tribe kept me. Not performatively. Not as a choice anyone announced. Just as a disposition. The chair at the table stayed mine. The name they called me stayed the same. The football game would not have been the football game without me. Somebody must have silently decided that, because I was never not invited.

There was one kid at school who came looking for me. His name was Graham, I think. He said he was going to get me. He was going to get me because I was smart and could see things other kids could not see, and that was reason enough. I was thirteen. I went to the playground. We fought. We both ended up with bloody noses. The next day we played football together.

Nobody sat us down. Nobody made us shake hands. Nobody told us the fight was over and football was starting. The fight happened on one day and the football happened on the next. Nothing in between was said about it, by us or by anybody else. That was the tribe doing to us what the tribe did to everyone it kept. Whatever had happened the day before stayed on the day before. The chair at the table stayed both of ours. The football game would not have been the football game without either of us.

I did not know at the time that this was anything. I assumed every difficult kid got kept like that. I found out, decades later, meeting people who had been cast out of their own childhoods, that it was not normal.

I had been held without knowing I was being held.

It is part of why I can see, now, what it looks like when a group does not do it, and what is lost.

Between my grandmother and the grass at the top of the street, I was given two pieces of the pattern this book is about. A grandmother who carried the knowledge inside the love. A tribe that did not cast out the odd ones.

Years later, some of us tried to put a name on this. A friend called us LinkyBrains, people who connect things other people cannot see. It caught, briefly, as these things do. We were naming the symptom. We did not yet have language for the container that produces the symptom. This book is my attempt, eight years later, to describe the container.

The next chapter is about what happened when I carried the pattern, without a name for it, into twenty years of working life.