September 28, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™ Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™ An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™ by Nelson S. Thall . Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca. and McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada
MEDIA SCIENCE 100
WHAT IS AI DOING TO US?
The Content May Be the Least Important Thing About It
A Student of Technology asks:
Nearly every public argument about artificial intelligence seems to concern its content. Is the answer accurate? Is it biased? Did AI, aka Pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), write the student's essay? Can it give medical advice? Can it produce convincing fake images? But isn't this concentrating on the least important part of the technology? If what we learned from the study of print is that nothing printed on the page is as important as understanding what print itself did to culture and society, shouldn't we be asking the same question about AI?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Precisely. Content is the figure; the technological environment is the ground. Professor McLuhan taught us that the consequences of print did not depend primarily upon what somebody printed. Print reorganized the senses, encouraged linearity and sequence, promoted standardization and specialization, and helped reorganize institutions and social life. Shakespeare and a grocery list could occupy the same technology. The words were different, but the environmental action of print continued regardless.
AI demands the same investigation. Whether the machine discusses Shakespeare, prepares a business report, writes computer code or recommends tonight's dinner is secondary to what happens when human beings routinely surrender investigation, memory, calculation, composition and elements of judgment to it. Every technological extension is accompanied by an amputation. The faculty increasingly performed by the technology becomes less necessary to exercise and grows numb. The danger is not merely that AI will occasionally give us the wrong answer. Even an AI that always gave us the right answer would still be changing us.
Yet AI is also an extraordinary engine of retrieval. It reaches backward into the accumulated language, images, forms, formulas, conventions and clichés of our culture and retrieves them almost instantaneously. The cliché can become archetype when what had disappeared into the cultural ground is suddenly made visible again. When machines write, we may be forced to rediscover what human writing means. When machines remember for us, memory itself becomes visible. When PCM simulates the artifacts of consciousness, we may be compelled to examine consciousness itself. The technology can retrieve into awareness the very human faculties its extensions threaten to obscure.
Push the process further and it reverses. A technology introduced to enhance human capability can produce dependency. A machine designed to assist judgment can become the place to which judgment is surrendered. A technology providing unprecedented access to knowledge can leave us increasingly unpracticed in the investigation through which knowledge was once acquired. What kind of human being does this environment produce? One who is well supplied with answers and increasingly unpracticed at finding them.
That is the TECHNOTRAP™. Technology Ecology™ is the countermeasure because it trains us to recognize the environmental effects of our technologies before they disappear into the ground and become invisible. The issue is not whether we accept or reject AI, but whether we remain conscious of what it enhances, what it obsolesces, what it retrieves, and what it reverses into. We stare at what the machine produces and fail to notice what the machine is producing in us.
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All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence, aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), was not employed. We hired a stenographer. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com