Human–Machine Interaction

Human Beings as Differentiated from All Other Forms of Life

Many differing characteristics have been championed as key elements that differentiate human beings from all other orders of life. In itself, the fact that this question is posed so often indicates how desperately humans have sought to distinguish and divorce themselves from the rest of the animal world. Among the candidates offered are the utilization of language, the capabilities rendered by the opposable thumb, the capacity for an upright gait, and even the form of face-to-face sexual intercourse, which is very rarely practiced outside the human species. Such characteristics are certainly attractive as potential causal explanations, but whether they are, individually or collectively, open to empirical resolution is itself an interesting conundrum. What is offered in this entry is an account founded on the use of advanced forms of tools, specifically machines. As will become evident, we seek also to distinguish “mere” tools from externally powered machine systems.

Evolution is typically associated with Charles Darwin's theory, in which each individual organism adapts to its ambient environment and certain associated and subsequently transmittable advantages are “selected” as a function of experienced, contextually contingent pressures. But what of the process of selection in our contemporary human species? What are the pressures exerted by our environment that currently surrounds us? Most likely, you are reading this tract in book form or via some technological appendage in a designed and “artificial” environment that has been created by human beings who have preceded you. What are the “natural” constraints you are now experiencing? Our answer is that such constraints are now predominantly self-determined. That is, humans have conceived, created, and constructed the main fabric of the modern world in which we live. Thus, although we acknowledge and recognize that there is quite a spectrum of tool use in the animal kingdom and indeed that most living systems look to optimize their own living conditions as far as it is within their control, it is only we humans who occupy a dominantly self-manufactured environment. More formally, specific, species-produced orthotics, which then themselves co-adapt, are confined solely to human beings. That co-adaptation occurs at a frequency that is derived from the integration of the respective timescales of change as represented by variation rate in the organism (human) and the orthotic (machine) themselves. Peter A. Hancock and Gabriella Hancock have termed this characteristic the self-symbiotic species. This is perhaps the dimension that makes human beings unique.

Now one of the great conflicts of the late 19th century can be reconciled. Humans are indeed animals in that they possess the fundamental structure and functions common to all animal life. Thus, Darwin was correct. Yet we are not only animals. We have been involved, sui generis, in the creation of a new form of hybrid species in which we are ever more progressively conjoining with the product of our own minds. We are certainly not gods, but we have used what the English mathematician and occultist John Dee (1581) called thaumaturgike (he referred to it as a low form of magic) to elevate ourselves beyond any other living system (at least any that is currently known to us).

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