THE HUMAN WE NEVER WROTE ABOUT

In one of its chapters, an Englishman named Barker explains to the former President of Nicaragua his vision of a great cosmopolitan civilisation, one that will embrace the talents of every people it absorbs.

The President asks how Barker catches a wild horse.

“I never catch a wild horse,” replied Barker, with dignity.

With dignity.

The President then turns to the English schoolmaster.

If a Bedouin Arab cannot read, an English missionary or schoolmaster will be sent to teach him. But if the schoolmaster cannot ride a camel, will anyone think of paying a Bedouin to teach him?

The President goes further. The Esquimaux may learn to vote for a County Council. But will his teachers learn from him how to spear a walrus?

Then he returns to the wild horse.

In Nicaragua, people once knew how to catch wild horses by lassoing their forefeet. It was considered one of the finest methods in South America.

Was that knowledge among the talents civilisation had promised to embrace?

The President thinks something has been lost.

Barker concedes the loss but dismisses it as a barbarian skill. Civilisation, he argues, has given humanity better things.

The President's conclusion is simple:

“…something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilised.”

G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Book I, Chapter II, “The Man in Green”.

More than a century has passed.

Humanity now has a new reader.

It can process more written material than any person could read in a lifetime: books, scientific papers, laws, newspapers, letters, and the endless conversations of the internet.

We call it artificial intelligence.

And perhaps one of the first questions we should have asked it was a remarkably simple one.

What kind of human being do you know?

We ask AI about the future, war, justice, love, and human nature. We expect it to reason about who we are.

But where did it learn about us?

From what we wrote.

Whose lives made it onto the page?

We know the names of kings, generals, conquerors, philosophers, and reformers. Thousands of books tell their stories.

But how much has been written about those who knew how to survive where others would not last a few days? People who understood the land, forests, ice, oceans, and animals through generations of experience?

Some societies left vast libraries. Others passed their knowledge down through stories, observation, and practice.

Some languages generate an immense written record every day. Others have left only fragments.

A hunter could look at Arctic ice and know where it was safe to walk. A visiting teacher could show him how to read.

Each knew something the other did not.

Yet only one was expected to be the student.

How often has this happened when two people, each with something to teach, met?

The human we never wrote about

Perhaps much of what civilisation discarded really was superstition.

But was all of it?

While someone who possesses a skill is still alive, we can ask them to demonstrate it, explain it, and put it to the test.

Once that knowledge disappears, and all that survives is someone else's judgement of its worth, how can we know what was actually lost?

Even our mistakes deserve a place in the record.

What did someone believe? Why did it seem true? What changed their mind? And if nothing did, how did that belief shape their life?

The hunter who read the ice could be wrong.

So could the teacher who assumed the hunter had nothing to teach him.

But if only one of them left an account, we may never discover whose mistake became accepted wisdom.

What can artificial intelligence understand about how humanity learned if we show it only what humanity eventually learned?

We can give our new reader everything that has survived. It can study the works of scholars, the records of rulers, and the accounts of travellers and teachers.

But to discover what the person on the other side of the classroom knew, someone must still sit beside that person and ask.

While there is still someone left to ask.

So what kind of human being are we preparing to pass on to the future?

The one we managed to describe?

Or the whole of humanity we have yet to discover?