Once upon a time there was a man without technology. Naked and helpless in the primordial savannah, armed only with his ingenuity to survive the dangers of nature. Then, one day, someone chipped a stone and created the first tool. And nothing was like before. Thus begins the story of the union between our species and its inventions: a story as old as the genus Homo, which transformed an ordinary primate into the hyper-connected cyborgs of today. A story of co-evolution, as the philosopher calls it Tom Chatfield, in which the biological and the artificial intertwine to the point of almost merging. To understand who we really are, says Chatfield in his last essay, we must rediscover this ancient connection with technology. And relearn how to live it with awareness in the digital age.
Born to invent
Technology is not optional for our species. It is a distinctive characteristic, a fundamental adaptive trait that has always been with us. Long before Homo sapiens appeared on Earth, our hominid ancestors they had already developed a sophisticated technological culture, based on stone tools and on the use of fire.
And these are not simple accessories, but real evolutionary game-changers. Thanks to the technologies of the time, our ancestors were able to access new sources of food, expand into new environments and, above all, develop an intergenerational transmission of knowledge no longer linked only to genes, but also to cultural learning.
In other words, technology became an integral part of our survival strategy. No longer an optional, but an indispensable element of our adaptation to the environment. Second nature, one might say, which joined the purely biological one, shaping our destiny as a species. And there are still people who say "without technology we lived better". When? There has practically NEVER BEEN a time without technologies.
Technology, the extended mind
But the impact of technology is not limited to our lifestyle or our habitat. Philosophers like Andy Clark e David Chalmers they have been arguing it for a long time: the tools we create have also profoundly changed the very nature of our mind, extending its boundaries beyond the skull.
Think about how often we rely on our smartphones to remember information, orient ourselves in space or perform complex calculations. For many of us, these devices have become so integrated with our mental lives that losing them is like losing a piece of ourselves.
In a certain sense, Chatfield argues, we have become hybrid systems, coupled symbiotically with our technological tools. Our cognition is no longer confined to the brain, but extends and is enhanced thanks to the artificial supports we have created.
Naturally, this raises a number of non-trivial ethical questions. If our mind is distributed across the technological world around us, then the values and priorities embedded in that world become crucial. Do we really want to delegate intimate tasks such as child care or social communication to algorithms and automatic systems? How far can we push cognitive outsourcing without losing something essential about our humanity?
Technology, anthropomorphic deception
One of the main challenges in this “negotiation with technology” is our tendency to anthropomorphize it, that is, to treat machines as if they were sentient entities similar to us. This “anthropomorphic illusion”, which we took with irony in the case of the first voice assistants, is particularly insidious in the case of modern artificial intelligence systems, capable of simulating human conversations and reasoning in a sometimes disturbing way.
But however sophisticated, Chatfield reminds us, even the most advanced language models and chatbots are not remotely comparable to a human mind. They are, after all, statistical engines, working through colossal pattern recognition and prediction generation. They are not sentient not even in a dream, they do not possess a true understanding, nor a coherent vision of the world, nor an interior life as we understand it. And be careful: they don't even need it to "conquer the world".
Me for me, you for you
Therefore, viewing AI as human is deeply misleading and potentially dangerous. It can push us to have more faith in these systems than we should, to attribute feelings to them and rights that they do not currently have, and to underestimate corporate agendas and the limitations that lie behind their veneers faces/interfaces.
Even more worrying is the risk that, By anthropomorphizing technology, we end up considering ourselves as machines. In a world increasingly optimized for algorithmic efficiency, it is all too easy to internalize a hyper-mechanistic view of ourselves, as if we too were mere software to be updated and hardware to be upgraded.
But this technological reductionism, Chatfield warns, is a dead end. We are not machines, nor should we aspire to be. We are organic, emotional, relational, unpredictable and meaningful creatures. Trying to “solve” the human condition as an engineering problem is a category mistake.
Towards a wiser future
Where then does this awareness take us? To recognize that technology is not something foreign to human history, but the very medium in which that history unfolds. There is no point in wondering what a world without technology would be like, because such a world has not existed for millions of years.
What we can do, however, is critically question our current relationship with technology and consciously orient it in a direction more aligned with our values and well-being. This means carving out spaces to cultivate authentic human connections and sense-making processes free from digital mediation. It means establishing healthy boundaries about which intimate domains of our lives we want to keep free from automation and algorithmic logic. And it means recognizing that technological "progress" is not an end in itself, but a means to improve the quality of life of real people.
Instruments. Tools everywhere.
Paradoxically, adopting a long-term perspective on the evolution of technology can help us have a more reflective and selective approach to its future. By placing today's innovations in the great arc of man-technology co-evolution, we remember that every tool, from flint to smartphone, is only valid for the use we make of it.
The question is not whether we will live with technology, but HOW we will live with it. Unknowingly or knowingly, passively or proactively, recklessly or wisely. In grappling with this question, we are participating in a conversation as old as culture itself. A conversation that, with any luck, will help us build a future that lives up to our technological legacy and our deepest human potential.
