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What does it mean to be human in the age of technology?

Meaningful collaboration between people and machines must not subvert human creativity, feeling and questioning over speed, profit and efficiency
‘If there’s one thing our swelling collective articulacy as a species brings home, it’s that people care above all about other people: what they think, do, believe, fear, hate, love, laugh at – and what we can make together’
‘If there’s one thing our swelling collective articulacy as a species brings home, it’s that people care above all about other people: what they think, do, believe, fear, hate, love, laugh at – and what we can make together’ Photograph: Alamy
When I think about the future of human-machine interactions, two entwined anxieties come to mind.

First, there is the tension between individual and collective existence. Technology connects us to each other as never before, and in doing so makes explicit the degree to which we are defined and anticipated by others: the ways in which our ideas and identities do not simply belong to us, but are part of a larger human ebb and flow.

This has always been true – but rarely has it been more evident or more constantly experienced. For the first time in human history, the majority of the world’s population is not only literate – itself an achievement less than a century old – but also able to actively participate in written and recorded culture, courtesy of the connected devices pervading almost every country on earth.

This is an astonishing, disconcerting, delightful thing: the crowd in the cloud becoming a stream of shared consciousness.

We think of ourselves as individual, rational minds, and describe our relationships with technology on this basis
Second, there is the question of how we see ourselves. Human nature is a baggy, capacious concept, and one that technology has altered and extended throughout history. Digital technologies challenge us once again to ask what place we occupy in the universe: what it means to be creatures of language, self-awareness and rationality.

Our machines aren’t minds yet, but they are taking on more and more of the attributes we used to think of as uniquely human: reason, action, reaction, language, logic, adaptation, learning. Rightly, fearfully, falteringly, we are beginning to ask what transforming consequences this latest extension and usurpation will bring.

I call these anxieties entwined because, for me, they come accompanied by a shared error: the overestimation of our rationality and our autonomy. In asking what it means to be human, we are prone to think of ourselves as individual, rational minds, and to describe our relationships with and through technology on this basis: as isolated “users” whose agency and freedom are a matter of skills and reasoned options; as task-performers who are existentially threatened by any more efficient agent.

The evolutionary pressures surrounding machines are every bit as intense as in nature and with few of its constraints
This is one view of human-machine interactions. Yet it’s also an account of human beings that gives us at once too little and too much credit. We know ourselves to be intensely social, emotional, intractably embodied creatures. Much of the best recent work in economics, psychology, and neuroscience has emphasized the degree to which we cannot be unbundled into distinct capabilities: into machine-like boxes of distinct memory, processing, and output.

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Neither language, culture nor a human mind can exist in isolation, or spring into existence fully formed. We are interdependent to an extent we rarely admit. We have little in common with our creations – and a nasty habit of blaming them for things we are doing to ourselves.

• What makes all this so urgent is the brutally Darwinian nature of technological evolution. Our machines may not be alive, but the evolutionary pressures surrounding them are every bit as intense as in nature and with few of its constraints. Vast quantities of money are at stake, with corporations and governments vying to build faster, more efficient, and more effective systems; to keep consumer upgrade cycles ticking over. To be left behind – to refuse to automate or adopt – is to be out-competed.

As the philosopher Daniel Dennett, among others, has pointed out, this logic of upgrade and adoption extends far beyond obvious fields such as finance, warfare, and manufacturing. If a medical algorithm is proven to produce more consistently accurate diagnoses than a physician, it’s both unethical and legally questionable to refuse to use it. As self-driving or semi-autonomous cars become more affordable and road-legal, it’s hard to argue against the ethical and regulatory case for making them obligatory. And so on. Few fields of human endeavor are likely to remain untouched.

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