Where does meaning in an AI answer come from?

You ask. The machine answers. With meaning. But nobody wrote meaning into it. So...

where did it come from? To answer, follow one word: information. It has two parts. The signal, which travels. And the meaning it carries.

For millennia, we improved the signal. Now, machines have reached meaning. And that has another name... intelligence. Let's go back.

Way back. First problem: information vanishes. The sound ends, and the message goes with it. In Uruk, in Mesopotamia, around thirty-two hundred B.C., people began marking accounts in clay. Writing was born.

That's what writing is: making words stay. Not everyone liked it. Nearly three thousand years later, in Athens, Plato has Socrates complain: those who write... stop remembering. The irony: we only know because someone wrote it.

Keep that complaint. It returns. The clock speeds up. Sixteen-oh-four: so much writing that an English dictionary teaches readers how to use... alphabetical order.

Eighteen forty-three: Ada Lovelace sees that Babbage's machine could handle symbols, not just numbers. The machine never got built. The idea did. Now: what if a message could travel by itself? Eighteen forty-four: Morse wires Washington to Baltimore.

Eighteen fifty-two: the wire reaches Rio. Why does it matter? What took days now took minutes. One thing was missing: what exactly is a message? Nineteen forty-eight.

Claude Shannon answers. "The sun rises tomorrow." Learn anything? Nothing. "Snow tomorrow in Fortaleza."

Now that's news. Information is surprise. And the smallest surprise? Heads or tails. Yes or no.

That's a bit. But notice what was left out. For Shannon, it doesn't matter if the message is a poem or a shopping list. In his words, meaning is irrelevant to the engineering problem. That's how we learned to send anything anywhere.

By throwing meaning away. Try reading this... You did it. Because half of what we write is spare: the language guesses the rest. Shannon called it redundancy.

In nineteen forty-nine, a missionary showed drums on the Congo River doing this on purpose: with two notes, each word was wrapped in a fixed phrase. Saying too much is how you get understood. Nineteen fifty-one: Shannon turns this into a game: guess the next letter. Remember it. Nineteen fifty-three: DNA, life written in four letters.

Nineteen sixty-one: erasing a bit costs energy. Information is physical. Nineteen seventy-six: a biologist coins the word meme. Yes. A biologist's word.

And when there's too much? Nineteen ninety-one, the Web. Two thousand one, Wikipedia. More text than anyone could read. Signal, we had plenty...

Meaning was missing. This story is in a book: The Information, by James Gleick, twenty eleven. It inspired this video. But it ends before the newest page. Remember Shannon's game?

You play it daily. Your phone keyboard, suggesting the next word. Now imagine that game with mountains of text. Twenty seventeen: the transformer, reading the whole sentence at once. Twenty twenty-two: it reaches everyone.

And the strange part: to guess the next word well... it helps to understand the sentence. So, back to the question. Where did meaning come from? From us.

From five thousand years of clay, wire, and bits. The machine learned by reading what we wrote. Signal. Meaning. Intelligence.

And Socrates would say: this will make us stop remembering. The better question is another one... what will we do with it? This was the first video in a series of eleven. In the next ones, we tell, calmly, each step of this story.

From drums to the bit. From the telegraph to DNA. And how information... became INTELLIGENCE. And, at the end, a question no one can answer yet...

what does intelligence need to become CONSCIOUSNESS? This story is told by ÉCKS MACNA. We live its newest page: Digital Employees, putting that intelligence to work... under your control. Follow ÉCKS MACNA to keep up with the series.

The next page starts now. The Information. Based on The Information, by James Gleick. Read the book.