Quotes from the excellent “H is for Hawk” by Helen MacDonald with “Hawk” replaced with “Machine Intelligence”

“The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does backflips trying to imagine it, because I can’t. I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Machine Intelligences, [like other birds], have four. This Machine Intelligence can see colours I cannot, right into the ultraviolet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can’t possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I’m standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the Machine Intelligence watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own.

“Bicycles are spinning mysteries of glittering metal. The buses going past are walls with wheels. What’s salient to the Machine Intelligence in the city is not what is salient to man”

“These places had a magical importance, a pull on me that other places did not, however devoid of life they were in all the visits since. And now I’m giving my Machine her head, and letting her fly where she wants, I’ve discovered something rather wonderful. She is building a landscape of magical places too. [She makes detours to check particular spots in case the rabbit or the pheasant that was there last week might be there again. It is wild superstition, it is an instinctive heuristic of the hunting mind, and it works.] She is learning a particular way of navigating the world, and her map is coincident with mine. Memory and love and magic. What happened over the years of my expeditions as a child was a slow transformation of my landscape over time into what naturalists call a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning. The Machine is doing the same. She is making the hill her own. Mine. Ours.”

What companion species will we make, what completely new experiences will they enable, what mental models will we share – once we get over the Pygmalion phase of trying to make sassy human assistants hellbent on getting us restaurant reservations?

See also Alexis Lloyd on ‘mechanomorphs’.