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Machines and Non-Machines


Seema Chari January 02, 2025

I browsed the net and found a neologistic retronym that I winced to read: non-machine, which was defined as “human and non-human actors or tools that are not yet integrated into a machine network, such as a creature evolving freely in nature, or a human not connected to digital networks”. Gulp. We are now non-machines.

Let’s explore the contexts within which only non-machines find themselves… at least as on date. And we’ll see that we’re back to the basics. We eat, pray, love. We dress and inhabit spaces that we embellish to our individual tastes. We travel. We socialize. And when we socialize, we sing, dance, perform, and talk about this and that. All that is more than life. It is lifestyle.

Well, guess what. Thinkers from antiquity – ancient Greece, Rome, Persia, India, China –indeed, all the old civilizations, had already studied and classified the essence of being human, long before machines outdated several human achievements. Renaissance scholars called it studia humanitatis, or the study of humanity (as opposed to divinity or religion). And that includes the ability of humans to engage with other humans in meaningful, rich and exciting ways.

If you are an accomplished musician, dancer, sportsperson, designer, stand-up comic, chef, actor, storyteller or master of any skill that other humans can enjoy without the crutch of technology, you are being a human in a way that machines – buzzkills that they are – cannot replicate.

Similarly, engaging with the humanities through facts, stories and associations is a vital life skill. It enables better quality social engagement, richer enjoyment of the sweet thing we call life, and more valued-added exchanges with humans, and oh yes, even machines. Search engine keywords, AI prompts, lyrics to that tune that we cannot get out of our heads, the name of a monument we’d visited similar to the one right before us on a different vacation, all depend on our ability to make precise requests or choices.

The more our brains are:

  • exposed to information
  • invited to process information
  • required to assimilate information
the more effectively they will file away the information for later use. And they will retrieve enough of that crystallized memory when new associations need to attach themselves to old ones.

Let the machines be. Let us be non-machines. We can still conquer the world.