Man creates the machine and then learns to live only through it.
I am writing these reflections while conversing with a machine. I entrust to it questions, doubts, insights, and even anxieties about the technological world that made it possible.
This is perhaps the most accurate snapshot of our time: man questioning the machine about the risk of depending on the machine.
The contradiction is evident, but it is by no means superficial. Indeed, it is precisely in this contradiction that the heart of the contemporary problem lies. Thought still originates within man, in his inner self, in his capacity for abstraction, memory, imagination, and judgment.
But the moment it seeks to become text, a project, communication, an image, an organization, or a product, it almost inevitably enters into technological mediation.
Technology has not defeated man. It has progressively rendered him incapable of functioning without it.
Contemporary technological dependence does not arise from coercion, but from the gradual transformation of utility into necessity. This is its perfection: it does not need to impose itself by force, because it presents itself as a solution.
It does not command; it facilitates. It does not compel; it simplifies. It does not openly dominate; it becomes indispensable.Man creates the machine, so he should be its master. This statement is true in its first part, but becomes problematic in the second.
The machine originates as a tool, as an extension of the hand, the eye, memory, strength, and the capacity for calculation. But every technology, once introduced into collective life, alters the human environment that generated it. It produces new needs, new standards, new habits, and new forms of functional dependence.
From that moment on, it is no longer just man who uses the machine; the entire social system reorganizes itself around its presence.
This is the decisive point: technology never remains simply external to man. It enters into his behaviors, his expectations, his perception of time, the formation of his desires, and the very nature of his relationships.
At first, the machine fulfills a need. Then it alters that need. Finally, it becomes the very condition through which that need can be satisfied.
It is in this transition that utility becomes necessity.
The history of humankind is also the history of its cognitive technologies. Writing, even before the printing press, represented one of the greatest extensions of the human mind. It allowed memory to leave the body, to be fixed on a medium, to survive the voice, the physical presence, and the death of the person who had formulated the message.
The British Museum notes that cuneiform writing, developed in the area of present-day Iraq before 3200 B.C., is considered one of the oldest known forms of writing and also originated as a tool for administrative record-keeping in Mesopotamian cities.
Writing did not erase oral memory, but transformed it. It sustained it, prolonged it, and made it transmissible beyond the biological limits of the individual. From that moment on, knowledge was no longer merely what a living body could remember and recount. It also became what a symbol could preserve. With the invention of movable-type printing, this transformation underwent a decisive acceleration.
The Gutenberg Bible, available around 1455, is defined by the Library of Congress as the first major book printed in Western Europe using metal movable type; the same source notes that it should not be considered the first printed book ever, since movable-type techniques were already in use in Korea, but it nonetheless represented a turning point in European communication.
Printing made knowledge reproducible on a mass scale. It reduced the time required for copying, expanded the circulation of texts, and contributed to the transformation of culture, religion, science, and politics. From that moment on, access to knowledge no longer depended solely on the slowness of scribes, the rarity of the manuscript, or its exclusive custody by a few centers of learning. Yet printing, too, was a technology of mediation.
It, too, altered the relationship between humans, memory, authority, and truth. Every technology of knowledge liberates something and, at the same time, reorganizes something. Every achievement produces a new dependency.
The difference in our time, therefore, is not the existence of technology. Humans have always been technical beings. The difference lies in the speed with which contemporary technologies spread, integrate, and become part of the environment rather than merely tools. Electronic communication, radio, television, computers, the internet, smartphones, and artificial intelligence have progressively reduced the gap between invention, adoption, and social transformation.
What once took centuries to transform a civilization can now influence collective behavior within a few years. According to the International Telecommunication Union, by 2025 approximately 6 billion people—equal to 74% of the world’s population—will use the internet; in 2020, the figure was 60%, with 1.3 billion people coming online during that five-year period.
This figure is not merely statistical. It is anthropological.
It means that a vast part of contemporary human experience now flows through digital infrastructure: work, information, the economy, relationships, desire, archiving, orientation, consumption, education, administration, and public identity. We are no longer dealing with occasional tools. We are dealing with a global technical environment within which humans live, think, produce, and represent themselves.
Machines do not simply replace certain human functions. They re-educate us.
They accustom us to faster paces. They accustom us to immediate responses. They accustom us to constant availability. They accustom us to shorter wait times, to simplified processes, to delegating memory, to delegating orientation, to delegating choice.
Machines do not command us: they accustom us.
And this is perhaps the most effective form of technological domination. Not command, but habit. Not coercion, but convenience. Not imposition, but the constant promise of a simpler life. First, we delegate memory to digital archives.
Then we delegate navigation to maps. Then calculation to software. Then communication to platforms. Then research to search engines. Then writing to automated assistants. Then decision-making to recommendation algorithms.
Then, gradually, we begin to delegate parts of our judgment as well.
With each step, we gain efficiency, but we lose a small measure of human exercise.
It is not an immediately visible loss. No one suddenly wakes up feeling less free. Technological dependence creeps in through successive conveniences, through seemingly innocent simplifications, through daily micro-delegations that are rarely perceived as surrendering sovereignty. This is how a civilization can become dependent without realizing it: not through a declared surrender, but through a progressive accumulation of advantages.
The problem isn’t using machines. The problem is no longer knowing how to function without them.
There is also a further qualitative leap. Humans no longer depend on machines merely to live better. They depend on machines to govern the world that machines have helped to build. The financial, logistical, healthcare, administrative, production, communication, and information systems of contemporary societies are now so complex that they require technology to be maintained, controlled, updated, and protected. As an expert, sociologist and scientific researcher, I can affirm that we have created an environment that can no longer be managed by human biological capabilities alone.
This does not mean that humans have become useless. It does mean, however, that human social activity is increasingly techno-mediated.
Thought, at its origin, may remain human. But the moment it seeks to become effective action within the contemporary world, it tends to pass through a machine.
If you want to write: use a device.
If you want to publish: use a platform.
If you want to find your way: use a digital map.
If you want to make a purchase: use a computer system.
If they want to communicate, they use a network.
If they want to organize, they use software.
If they want to remember, they use an external archive.
If they want to produce, they use technology.
In this sense, the machine does not necessarily create the idea, but it increasingly governs the conditions of its empirical existence.
Here lies the most delicate core of the problem: humans still retain their imagination, but entrust an increasing portion of its realization to the machine. Humans retain intuition, but delegate an increasing portion of its execution to the machine. They retain desire, but express it within environments that guide it, measure it, predict it, and sometimes anticipate it.
The question is no longer merely:what can the machine do in place of humans?
The question becomes:what do humans stop practicing when the machine does it for them?
Every function that is not exercised tends to weaken. It does not necessarily disappear, but it loses its habit, resilience, and depth. Untrained memory becomes dependence on the archive. Unpracticed orientation becomes dependence on the navigation system. Unpracticed inquiry becomes dependence on the immediate answer. Uncultivated writing becomes dependence on assisted formulation. Untrained judgment becomes dependence on automatic selection. This is not a condemnation of technology.
That would be naive, as well as fruitless.
Technology has produced extraordinary advances: it has expanded access to knowledge, improved diagnoses and treatments, connected people far apart, made complex processes more efficient, and increased creative possibilities once unthinkable.
The point is not to deny the power of technology. The point is to recognize that every power requires a commensurate maturity in governance.
Even international institutions have begun to address the issue with growing caution. The 2023 UNESCO report on technology in education states that digital technology can offer important solutions, but it can also produce harmful effects if introduced without criteria of appropriateness, equity, and sustainability—and without genuine integration with direct educational interaction. The educational issue is central, because no society can navigate complex technology without cultivating minds capable of understanding it.
Living immersed in technology does not mean understanding it. Using a platform does not mean grasping its logic. Scrolling through content does not mean possessing critical thinking skills. Being connected does not mean being freer.
Proficiency in use is not the same as proficiency in understanding.
A society can be technologically advanced yet cognitively dependent. It can possess extremely powerful tools while its citizens are unable to interpret their consequences. It can multiply information while reducing knowledge. It can expand communication while impoverishing relationships. It can increase answers while decreasing questions.
This is where dependence becomes perfect: when it no longer appears as dependence, but as normality.
No one perceives as a chain what simplifies their life. No one immediately suspects convenience. No one fears a tool that responds, organizes, suggests, reminds, accompanies, entertains, and reassures. But the most subtle form of subordination is not the one that prevents action.
It is the one that makes it increasingly unthinkable to act differently. Technology does not need to abolish free thought. It is enough for it to gradually occupy the space between thought and the world. As long as an idea remains in the mind, it belongs to the individual.
But when it seeks to become communication, production, public presence, or social organization, it enters a technical system that shapes its form, speed, visibility, dissemination, and often even its perceived value.
This does not eliminate the human author. But it profoundly alters the nature of authorship.
Is someone who writes with a machine, designs with a machine, creates images with a machine, conducts research with a machine, organizes their time with a machine, or builds relationships through a machine still a subject? Yes. But they are an assisted, augmented, mediated, and guided subject.
A subject who must continually ask themselves where their own action ends and where the infrastructure that makes it possible begins. The problem is not the collaboration between humans and machines. The problem is the loss of awareness of this collaboration.
When mediation becomes invisible, dependence becomes culture.
Schools, families, universities, the workplace, politics, journalism, art, and the economy will increasingly have to grapple with this question: Which human faculties do we want to continue cultivating even when a machine is capable of performing them more quickly?
Not everything that can be delegated should be.
Memory, for example, is not merely an archive. It is identity. Attention is not merely concentration. It is presence in the world. Writing is not merely the production of text. It is the organization of thought. Waiting is not merely empty time. It is a space for maturation. A limit is not merely an impediment. It is a form of experience. A civilization that delegates everything that is laborious risks losing precisely what enables it to be free.
For this reason, the answer cannot be a rejection of technology. It is not a matter of going backward, nor of naively pitting the analog world against the digital world. Rather, it is a matter of rebuilding human sovereignty within technological civilization.
We need a new education in technology, but also one that goes beyond technology.
An education in memory, because without memory there is no identity.
An education in attention, because without attention there is no depth.
An education in slowness, because without slowness there is no processing.
An education in limits, because without limits there is no form.
An education in critical thinking, because without critical thinking the machine does not remain a tool: it becomes an environment, a criterion, a destiny.
The future does not belong to the person who rejects the machine. It belongs to the person who knows how to use it without being used by it, who knows how to make use of it without surrendering the totality of their faculties to it, who knows how to recognize technology not as an enemy, but as a power to be governed.
The decisive question is not whether the machine will become more powerful than humans.
In many areas, it already is. The deeper question is whether humankind will retain enough memory, judgment, imagination, and inner freedom to remain the subject of the world it has built. It is not a matter of preventing progress. It is a matter of preventing utility from becoming destiny, convenience from becoming dependence, the tool from becoming the environment, and the environment from becoming a cage.
Because the machine does not need to rebel against humans to dominate them.
It simply needs to become indispensable.
