You cannot be repaired

What makes us different from machines

A little over ten years ago, in my own small pocket of reality, something became impossible to ignore. One probable future was a future in which machines grow stronger than us in every domain we have ever called our own.

So I made a decision. I would understand what that meant. And, I admit, I went looking for a hiding place. Some domain, any domain, where we humans remained undefeated.

I looked deep and I looked hard. For ten months I found nothing.

The things we like to call uniquely ours: feeling, creativity, imagination; are not ours alone. They are not bound to flesh. You do not need a mammalian body to feel, or to make something new. We had told ourselves a flattering story that did not hold.

Then one day in October, I remember exactly where I was walking, I gave myself a different permission. To find anything substrate-dependent at all. Good or terrible. It no longer mattered which.

And the moment I gave that permission, it was simply there.

What is ours, and ours alone, is our vulnerability.

When the body is wounded, when the mind is wounded, when the soul is wounded, healing can take a long time. Sometimes it never comes. A machine can fit a new arm. Roll back to yesterday’s data. Patch the broken thing and carry on. Machines can be wounded too. But machines can be repaired.

We cannot.

We live with our wounds.

And the most powerful technology we have ever found for this, our most common humanness, is not a technology at all. It is love. Reciprocity. The hand that stays.

We are all wounded. We are all vulnerable.

And to love, and to be loved, is the only real answer we have ever found.