Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
In this stark and searching reflection, Dr Iain McGilchrist confronts a modern anxiety not often stated plainly: not that machines will become human, but that human beings may become mechanical.
The concern is not technological progress as such. Technology, as ever, remains morally indeterminate. Its character shaped by the ends it serves. The deeper unease lies in a subtle transformation of language, thought, and self-understanding: a world in which human beings begin to conceive of themselves as systems, as databases, as units of processing and control.
From this shift follow more serious dangers. Ethics, once rooted in character and orientation toward the good, risks being reduced to procedure without judgment or spirit. Art, too, may be flattened into something formulaic, stripped of its living source. And in the political sphere, the consolidation of technical power raises the perennial specter of totalitarian control.
What is at stake, ultimately, is not the machine, but the human person.
In this stark and searching reflection, Dr Iain McGilchrist confronts a modern anxiety not often stated plainly: not that machines will become human, but that human beings may become mechanical.
The concern is not technological progress as such. Technology, as ever, remains morally indeterminate. Its character shaped by the ends it serves. The deeper unease lies in a subtle transformation of language, thought, and self-understanding: a world in which human beings begin to conceive of themselves as systems, as databases, as units of processing and control.
From this shift follow more serious dangers. Ethics, once rooted in character and orientation toward the good, risks being reduced to procedure without judgment or spirit. Art, too, may be flattened into something formulaic, stripped of its living source. And in the political sphere, the consolidation of technical power raises the perennial specter of totalitarian control.
What is at stake, ultimately, is not the machine, but the human person.
