July 7, 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™
Nelson S. Thall, McLuhan Media Scientist, Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, California.
The Return of Acoustic Man:
Is Artificial Intelligence a Talking Machine That Makes Us More Human?
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, I read that AI is starting to change the way we talk. People are picking up the chatbots' favorite words, like "delve" and "meticulous," and saying them without noticing, even in ordinary conversation. And now that we talk to these machines out loud instead of typing, we do it even more. It made me wonder: if we spend all day talking to a machine, does it help us understand ourselves better, or does it just feel like it does?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Set good and bad aside and watch the real change. That the machine's words are seeping into ours is true, but it is only the surface. The deeper shift is that we are starting to speak to it out loud instead of typing in silence, a turn in the medium itself, from the written word back to the spoken one. You can hear the frightening version easily enough, the machine that gets inside us, that programs the mind the way we once programmed lessons. The question is not whether to fear it, but what it is doing.
Marshall McLuhan saw this possibility long before the arrival of Artificial Intelligence. He observed:
"Yeah, the child of the future is a rather terrifying thought. It makes even science fiction look rather tame. What is in effect happening is a kind of extension not only of the learning process, but of consciousness itself into the outer environment, so that the child of the future is likely to be able to program consciousness with the same ease with which we have previously programmed curricula.”
Yet he refused to fear that prospect:
"But I can't be terrified by such prospects, really, because these are also extensions of man. They are a means of becoming more oneself rather than ways of becoming alienated from oneself. You can't possibly imagine a technology except the most specialist fragmentary type that could possibly alienate man from himself. They amplify our powers, they accelerate our powers, and they enrich the learning process enormously.”
Here is what the talking does. We do not fully know our own minds until we speak them. A thought kept inside stays a fog; said aloud, it takes a shape you can look at. A feeling you cannot name rules you in the dark; spoken, it becomes something you can hold. This is old knowledge, the confession, the friend you think out loud with, all working the same way. Marshall McLuhan taught that every extension changes our relation to ourselves. Used consciously, it can become a means of discovering ourselves more fully. He often remarked that almost all of his discoveries came to him while talking in the classroom. He did not merely present ideas to his students; in speaking them aloud, he discovered them. A machine that gets us talking may also get us discovering. The more we hear ourselves, the more we know ourselves.
So read the effect without cheering or mourning. The machine can be turned to good use or bad, like every tool before it. But the act underneath the use runs one way. To speak is to examine; to put the inside into words is to meet it, and every voice that meets itself adds to the sum of what mankind knows.
Every age increases knowledge in its own way. Ours has done so by making conversation itself a technology. The Book of Daniel was sealed until the time of the end, when, it says, many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. Read that as you will, but the machine is such an increase, and such a running to and fro. It accelerates knowledge, and it begins with the oldest knowledge of all, the kind a man finds only when he speaks himself aloud.
Language is not merely something we use. It is the environment in which thought occurs. Artificial Intelligence is transforming that environment from one centered on information to one centered on conversation. The shift from typing to speaking is more than an improvement in convenience; it changes the ratio of our senses. Speech restores hearing, rhythm and dialogue to the center of experience, moving us from the visual bias of print toward the acoustic world Marshall McLuhan spent a lifetime describing.
The machine may teach us many things. The greatest may be that it teaches us to hear ourselves.
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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. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
I can be reached at nelson@themediumisthemessage.com