The Work of Automating Human Thought

In 1979, a linguist named Michael Reddy published a paper about a fundamental problem in human communication. That paper was “The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language,”1 and it argued that language speakers are trapped inside a metaphor so pervasive that it structures how we think about thinking itself.2 Roughly speaking, the metaphor works like this: when we talk about communication, we talk as if ideas are objects, words are containers, and communication is the act of sending those containers from one person to another. You put your thoughts into words. You get your ideas across. Someone extracts meaning from a text. The listener unpacks what the speaker said.