Somewhere on the internet right now, a human being is being asked to prove that she is human. She squints at a grid of blurred photographs, hunts for crosswalks and traffic lights, and clicks until a machine is satisfied that she is not one.
We barely notice how strange this small ritual is. Alan Turing’s test asked whether a machine could pass for a human. We have quietly inverted it: now the human performs her humanity for the machine’s approval.
I was reminded of this by a fine recent essay in the Financial Times by Sarah O’Connor, ‘The human brain is not a machine’ (16 June 2026). She traces the long temptation to see the brain as a kind of computer—Marvin Minsky’s “meat machines,” the older image of an enchanted loom—and then makes a sharper point than her title promises.
Her fear is not that our machines will rise to meet us, but that we will lower the bar by losing faith in who we are, and become more machine-like ourselves. That is worth exploring, because it points to a harm we are inflicting on ourselves largely without noticing.
Begin with the metaphor. The brain-as-computer is not a finding; it is a projection, and every age projects its most advanced technology onto the mind.
Descartes, amid the hydraulic automata of royal gardens, imagined nerves as pipes and spirits as fluid under pressure. The Victorians, having laid the telegraph, spoke of the brain as a switchboard. We have the computer, and so the mind becomes hardware running software.
Each age mistook its newest machine for truth about the mind, and forgot it had reached for a metaphor. We have done the same.
Here is where the harm enters, and it does so quietly. A metaphor adopted to understand ourselves ends by remaking us. We buy books on maximizing our productivity, strap devices to our wrists to measure ourselves and speak of needing to “recharge” before we “burn out.”
Physicians have a word for an illness produced by the treatment meant to cure it: iatrogenic. The machine metaphor is iatrogenic. Reached for to illuminate the human, it lowers the bar for the human, until we grow into the diminished thing the metaphor described—and then point to ourselves as proof. We use labels to describe ourselves but we let them define us eventually.
Nor is this confined to whether machines take our jobs. Writing in Bloomberg, Parmy Olson argues that the likeliest outcome is neither apocalypse nor utopia, but a hollowing-out of the work that survives.
People are set to supervising the algorithms that once did their thinking, and the work left to them grows more intense, more solitary, less creative. She reaches, as O’Connor does in her book, We Are Not Machines, for Frederick Winslow Taylor, who broke craft into measurable fragments and turned men into components of a machine.
The danger now wears a new dress: having handed the machine work that asks for the exercise of judgement, we keep only the watching part of the human role and call this loss progress.
None of this is fated; the direction we give our machines is a choice, not a destiny. The deepest answer is that we are not machines, because we are alive, and life is the one thing computation cannot counterfeit.
A thermostat regulates a room but does not care whether it is warm; nothing is at stake for it. A living organism cares, because its own continuation is at issue for it—it must maintain itself against decay or cease to be.
As many scholars in biology and the neurosciences now argue, consciousness may arise not from processing power but from this fact of being alive: from feeling, from the body’s stake in its own survival (Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 1994; Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring, 2021).
Because we are alive and not computers, no quantity of added computation need ever produce a mind. Our mortality and capacity to feel, which machine framing reads as bugs, are the operating system.
Which is why the oldest traditions reached this matter first, and deepest. When Michael Pollan ends more than 300 pages on consciousness by confessing that he knew less at the close than at the start, he has not failed; he has arrived where Upanishadic seers arrived at: the knower that can never be made an object of its own knowing.
The Katha Upanishad stages its whole inquiry as a dialogue between a boy and Death; it understands that mortality is not a flaw in the human, but the doorway to the question of the deathless. The machine faces no such koan. It is owed our skill in making it and our care in governing it, but not our self-esteem.
We need not look to machines to see the reflex at work; we have already turned it on the one practice built expressly to defeat it. Meditation exists to quiet the comparing, ranking, striving mind—to step out of the race altogether.
Yet a report in The Wall Street Journal (‘Competitive About Your Meditation? Relax, Everyone Else is Too,’ 12 June 2018) found its enthusiasts turning even this into a contest: logging unbroken streaks, climbing leaderboards in online groups, one firm even selling a wristband that delivered an electric shock as a prompt to be calm.
A man with a streak of more than 300 days conceded that, by then, he meditated mostly to keep the count going. We took the very instrument for escaping the rat race to enter the rat race.
So the thing we have most to fear is not the machine. It is what the machine draws out of us. The urge to measure ourselves against it—to prove ourselves its master, or to concede inferiority—is the restlessness of a creature unsure of its own ground. And a creature that feels diminished does its worst. We dread a power that is, after all, our own creation; and the dread is the danger.
That, and not some awakening of silicon, is the real risk of this age: that having mistaken ourselves for machines, we will expect far too much of ourselves in the things that do not matter, and far too little in the things that do—and forget, in the din of the contest, the still consciousness that never needed the contest at all.
These are the author’s personal views.
The author is chief economic advisor, Government of India.