Human Scale AI#
Humans have been making computational devices for thousands of years. The Antikythera mechanism, abacuses, slide rules, and the Difference Engine. And in the mid-20th century we get digital computers, and the whole “computation” thing really takes off. I’m not gonna do the “pull smartphone out of pocket and compare it to the size of the computers of yesteryear” bit, but not because it’s not staggering—it’s just that you’ve all heard it before and we’re no longer amazed by the computational power we carry in our pockets.
Then in 2022 ChatGPT and Large Language Models break into the mainstream, and we can not only talk to our computing devices—but they can answer back. Again, this is fundamentally just more computation, it’s just that it speaks our language (because that’s what we trained it to do).
But there’s a cost to the march of acceleration and miniaturisation in computing ability. We can no longer look at a computing device in action and see what’s going on… not even a little bit. We’re increasingly disconnected in our understanding of how computation works.
That’s the background for the Cybernetic Studio’s Human Scale AI project. We interact with computational devices more than ever before, but we’re alienated from the nuts and bolts of their operation. Our claim—grounded in a history of hands-on experimentation and knowledge creation in the cybernetic “mangle of practice”—is that it is possible to slow these computations down and “blow them up” so that we can see them at work. Human sense perception is amazing—so if we can bring AI within that range; make it a human scale—then we can apply all our sensory tools to try and make sense of it.
Does it mean that we’ll see the matrix, ones and zeroes in neon-green-on-black? Well, no, but that’s not the point. Because even glimpse of computation at human scale helps us better orient ourselves to the way it flows around and through us even when we can’t see it. By making and using these human-scale AI systems we can make better decisions about how to participate, when to abstain, and how to ensure that computation continues to benefit us all at every scale.
Dr. Ben Swift Cybernetic Studio Lead October 2025
