Today I have apparently been conducting field research into human communication.
Not intentionally.
I would have preferred a cup of tea.
But the theme kept presenting itself.
A website person asked me for a “WordPress file” after I had already sent them the link to the WordPress page.
An AI support bot recently gave me instructions using terminology that didn’t match the buttons actually on the screen.
A conversation about a shooting range became increasingly confusing because the person explaining it knew exactly what all the shooting terminology meant.
I didn’t.
And even medical specialists can apparently have trouble understanding the terminology used by specialists in another medical field.
Which brings us to another rather wonderful feature of HUMAN.EXE:
But I know what I mean.
The problem is that knowing what you mean is not quite the same thing as communicating it to somebody else.
Every field develops its own language.
Medicine has it.
Technology has it.
Shooting has it.
Spirituality certainly has it.
And jargon is useful.
Once everyone knows what the words mean, an enormous amount of information can be compressed into a very small space.
I find this particularly funny because I was once a stenographer.
Shorthand really is a specialist language — a system of symbols designed to compress spoken language so it can be recorded quickly.
But there was one rather important feature:
We were taught the same system.
I even got a job as a Town Clerk’s secretary because, apparently, I was the only person interviewed who could understand his Scottish accent.
So I have some historical form in translating humans.
But modern shorthandspeak seems to have taken the whole idea to another level.
We all develop shorthand.
Professions have it.
Workplaces have it.
Families have it.
Couples have it.
Communities have it.
Individual humans have it.
And shorthand is wonderfully efficient — provided everyone has downloaded the same glossary.
The trouble begins when we assume they have.
We say:
“It’s on the range.”
“Update it in Elementor.”
“The histology shows an interstitial something-or-other.”
“Your energetic blah-de-blah is activating your quantum whatsit.”
And then stare at the other person as though they are the problem when they say:
“What?”
Sometimes we even explain it again.
Using more of the same terminology.
Only louder.
Because apparently HUMAN.EXE contains an ancient communication protocol:
IF PERSON DOES NOT UNDERSTAND
THEN REPEAT SAME INFORMATION WITH INCREASED IRRITATION.
Surprisingly, repeating yourself more loudly does not cause the other person’s brain to automatically download your glossary.
And perhaps this is one of the interesting things AI is showing us about ourselves.
We complain when AI misunderstands what we meant.
But humans do this to each other constantly.
We leave out context.
We use shorthand.
We assume shared knowledge.
We forget that the picture inside our head is not automatically available inside somebody else’s.
Then we’re astonished when they construct a completely different picture from the information we actually gave them.
Maybe good communication isn’t primarily about speaking clearly.
Maybe it begins one step earlier:
Remembering that the other mind is not your mind.
It doesn’t matter whether that other mind belongs to your partner, your doctor, your client, your web developer, or an artificial intelligence.
If something is necessary for understanding, sometimes you actually have to say the bloody thing.
Because “But I know what I mean” may be perfectly true.
Unfortunately, it remains a fairly shit communication system.
HUMAN.EXE
Still running.
Still assuming everyone downloaded the same glossary.
Glossary not found. 😂