CONCEPT
Transport (Ingold)
The mode of movement in which the traveler is delivered from origin to destination along a predetermined route — Ingold's contrast-term to wayfaring, and the structural form AI collaboration pressures all making toward.
Transport is Ingold's term for movement that connects predetermined points without requiring the traveler to attend to the terrain between them. The transported person knows where she started, where she arrived, and how long it took; she does not know the landscape she moved through, because the movement did not demand her attention to it. The line of transport is the ancestor of every technology that calculates routes: postal systems, freight logistics, GPS navigation, turn-by-turn directions, and now the prompt-execute cycle. Each represents a successful abstraction of the movement from the terrain, reducing the journey to its endpoints and absorbing the in-between into a process the traveler does not participate in. The productivity gain is real — transport is efficient — and the epistemic cost is also real: the traveler arrives without having traveled, and the perceptual capacities that only terrain-engagement develops are not deposited in her body.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept sharpens the diagnostic