In the 1960s scientists were pursuing more intelligent machines. They sought to replicate the human vision system in computers. This vision required memory in which data extracted from images would supplement new ones the computer was exposed to. If it recognized what it saw, it could learn. By the 1980s, computers had the ability to increase the definition of a digital image from the catalog of like types it stored. Part document, part fabrication, the resulting images were called hallucinations. Today, the term remains in use to describe large language models that are said to hallucinate quotes that have not been written from books that have not been published. What a computer doesn’t know, it makes up.

One origin of systems thinking is the desire to understand human self-knowledge through the external expansion of the senses. For example, lenses are the apparatus through which we came to grasp the technics of the eye through the study of the cosmos. Likewise, the computer in the…