Alistair’s talk was to me one of the most thought provoking we received as part of the D&T lecture series. He began by talking about the Vogelherd horse which is an ancient and skilfully carved sculpture found in Germany and is evidence of considered artistic practice by ancient civilizations. The point was that we as a species use our environment as the basis of our thoughts. The modern terminology “horsepower” is defined by our earliest use of our environment to our advantage. This idea was further reinforced by the example of the fire hose pump. It was the medical understanding of the human heart which enabled this now ubiquitous invention. An interesting phrase used was: “surrogate muscle”. As our technology advances, we find ever more efficient ways of achieving our goals, and so the advance of technology is exponential. The example used to illustrate this was that of communication. From the invention of the telegram we have been finding ever faster ways of sharing information, and since the invention of the internet the amount of data available to the everyday person is unfathomable. Throughout history our physical work has been replaced by machines, but Alistair hinted at a more sinister future. It is no longer just our physical world that is mechanized, but our informational world. Our environment inspires what we create but the things we create also feedback into our thought processes. So much of what we know about the world now comes from the internet, but with so much global information it is now nearly impossible to verify the truth of what we are told. The news we see is tailored to us, designed to keep us reading for longer, and the boundary between truth and folklore has become blurred. Between the carving of the Vogelherd horse and the present day the world has become a totally different place, but for most of that time our environment was largely the same. For many people the internet now makes up a large portion of their time spent awake and so it has become the digital environment. The worrying thing is that it does not abide by the laws of nature which shaped us as a species, and instead is constructed of powerful man-made algorithms. For most people, their online presence is a small bundle of data that they have chosen to share, however companies like Google and Facebook can map even the most fragmented data and form a coherent and frighteningly deep understanding of a person and their motivations. By understanding people’s motivations these companies can influence the decisions we make, and they will aim this new weapon wherever the highest bidder points. Given that so much of the information we receive comes from the internet, it seems inevitable that our thought processes will come to mirror its patterns and rhythms. There is already evidence of people’s attention span and short-term memory being impaired by constant clicking and scrolling between small pieces of information, so will our thinking eventually become algorithmic? A question Alistair raised during his lecture was that of the “surrogate brain”. Is it possible to replace the human brain with a machine? A machine can follow rules, but will they ever have the capacity for metacognition? What I wonder is whether it is necessary to replace the human brain at all?. When all our information is censored and hand picked by algorithms, we essentially become the algorithm. Has the process has already begun to turn the brain into a machine?