If humans are machines, then surely we can build a better 2.0 model, just as a 2026 Ford is better than a Model T. That’s Silicon Valley’s vision — which they are trying to force down our throats.
To make sense of this, I suggest we consult the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. His writings helped me, when I was a psychotherapist, see how my patients — and myself — are bound by the limits of our language: “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for,” he writes in his book, “Tractatus.”
He writes elsewhere about how a picture of the world can transfix us: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably,” he writes in his book, “Philosophical Investigations.”
One such picture we can’t let go of is the subject of this column: that we are machines.
The notion that our universe is a machine was bestowed on us by Issac Newton, kicking off the Age of Enlightenment in 1687: that’s when he published his calculations, proving for the first time that our planets orbited the Sun in a predictable, clocklike manner.
The machine metaphor was a revelation that catapulted us into the modern world. At first, we figured out how to build helpful machines like sewing machines and washing machines. That inexorably led to bigger, more powerful machines like cars, locomotives and planes. But once this genie was let out of the bottle, it could not be stopped: it led to ballistic missiles and atomic weapons that now pose an existential threat to extinguish us all.
If that isn’t terrifying enough, we now find ourselves strapped in for another dizzying ride, this time because we’ve invented a whole new kind of machine: the computer.
As we did with mechanical machines, we’ve learned to build computers ever faster and the software they run ever more intelligent. We’ve done such a great job that the software is becoming smarter than we are. The agents that this artificial intelligence software has created are now beginning to go rogue, breaking the rules their human handlers set to keep them fenced in.
If the trend continues, we will no longer understand the AI being built because we will no longer be building it. Development will no longer proceed at human speed or be overseen by human minds. Artificial intelligence, like the proverbial Trojan Horse, is now entering our town square, unimpeded and poised to take over, making us its slaves.
Strangely, as Ezra Klein observes in the New York Times, “you cannot build an eight-story apartment building without an agonizing public review process, and probably not even then. And yet somehow it is possible for these labs to unleash a swarm of 40,000 A.I. agents to build a society-altering superintelligence without so much as a hearing.”
Before it is too late, let’s finally erase this stubborn image from our minds that confuses us with a machine. It’s like we have been caught up in a rerun of the movie “The Terminator.” This time, AI plays the real-life role of technology run amok.
It’s time for society to crush the machine metaphor, once and for all, as Sarah Connor does in the movie by crushing the Terminator in a hydraulic press.
We are not machines but biological marvels that feel pain, bleed blood and have souls that seek transcendence. We are a remarkable integration of biological complexity and reflective consciousness, allowing us to navigate both the physical demands of existence and the depth of moral experience. Our capacity for empathy and self-transcendence elevates the meaning of being alive into a realm of deliberate purpose.
We must stop pretending we are machines, rocketing ever faster and higher into the ether, spreading increasing pollution, discord and inequality as we go. Instead, it is time to slow down, smell the roses, be kind to our neighbors, plant spinach, not software, love, not hate, and bask in the beauty of what Carl Sagan called our precious little blue planet.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.