Silicon in the Tropics: Truth, Thought and the New Digital Masters in a Rebuilding Jamaica

There is something deeply human about putting words in order.

From the chatter in Coronation Market to the careful reasoning of a Supreme Court judgment, from a sermon in St. Mary to a valuation report in Kingston, thinking involves arranging words and concepts into meaningful sequence. Order creates sense. Sense creates understanding. Understanding shapes action.

Now we are told that our new masters have arisen — machines that can put words in order faster than any of us ever could.

Artificial Intelligence, we are assured, can think.

But can it?

AI is extraordinarily good at arranging words. It has been trained on oceans of writing — philosophy, law, science, literature, journalism — drawn from some of the sharpest minds the world has ever known. It gleans patterns from the ordering of those words. It predicts, with breathtaking statistical precision, what word is likely to come next.

That is impressive. But it is not the same thing as understanding.

The machine does not know what a word me…