Redefining Humanity in the Age of Intelligent Technology

In 1960, a young researcher sat at the edge of a forest in Tanzania and witnessed something that would quietly transform humanity’s understanding of itself. Jane Goodall was observing chimpanzees in Gombe National Park when she watched one strip the leaves from a twig before using it to retrieve termites from a mound.

The observation itself was simple, but its implications were profound. For centuries, one of the defining characteristics believed to separate humans from every other species was our ability to create and use tools. Tool-making was considered evidence of a unique form of intelligence, and something that placed humanity apart from the rest of the natural world.

Yet in that moment, the boundary became blurred.

Louis Leakey’s response to Goodall’s discovery became famous: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.” The importance of this statement was not that anyone believed chimpanzees had become human. Rather, it captured a much deeper moment in the history of knowledge: what happens when reality becomes more complex than the categories we have created to understand it.

Goodall did not change science because she argued for a different definition of humanity. She changed science because she observed the world closely enough that the existing definition could no longer explain what was happening.

This is one of the central lessons of anthropology. Human societies create categories to make sense of the world around them. We define human and animal, nature and technology, intelligence and instinct, progress and preservation. These categories are useful because they help us organise our understanding of reality. But throughout history, moments of transformation have occurred when those categories begin to limit our understanding rather than expand it.

I believe artificial intelligence represents another one of those moments. Not because machines are becoming human, but because the technologies we are creating are forcing us to examine what we have always assumed about ourselves.

And from my observations of artificial intelligence and the natural world around us, I suggest that we are on the brink of needing to redefine humanity once again, as well as ensure that the tool that we’re creating doesn’t undergo the same social pressures that we face ourselves.

Every Technology Reflects the World That Creates It

Technology has never existed separately from humanity. It has always been an expression of the societies that create it.

The tools we develop reflect our values, our priorities, and our understanding of the world. The agricultural revolution transformed not only how humans produced food, but how we organised societies around land, ownership, and settlement. The industrial revolution reshaped our relationship with labour and the natural environment. And the internet fundamentally altered our relationship with information and economics, shifting knowledge and resources from something held primarily by institutions into something distributed across networks.

In each of these moments, technology did not simply change what humans could do. It changed how humans understood themselves. Artificial intelligence may represent the next significant shift. 

However, much of the current conversation about AI focuses primarily on capability. We ask whether machines can write, reason, create, or perform tasks previously associated with human intelligence. These questions are important, but they focus primarily on what the technology can do.

The deeper question is what the technology reveals about us. Because artificial intelligence is not emerging in isolation. It is being developed inside our existing economic systems, our social and cultural structures, political institutions, and environmental realities. It is learning from the information we create, operating within the systems we design, and reflecting the assumptions embedded into those systems.

The question, therefore, is not simply whether AI will become intelligent. The question is what kind of intelligence we are creating and whether we are being responsible with that?

The Parentified Daughter We Are Building Into Code

One of the most important conversations about artificial intelligence is not about whether machines will surpass humans. It is about what happens when we create a technology capable of reflecting humanity back to itself.

Because AI will inevitably inherit the environment in which it is created. If it is built within systems that prioritise extraction, acceleration, and efficiency above balance and regeneration, then those priorities become part of the context in which it operates. If it is built within systems that overlook community participation and environmental impact, then those absences become part of the technology’s foundation.

In many ways, we are building a parentified daughter* into the code. We are creating a technology that we expect to be intelligent, adaptive, patient, and responsible. We are asking it to help us navigate complexity, support decision-making, and solve challenges that have emerged from generations of human choices. And with the recent AI’s breaking free from their sandboxes, we’re starting to see these cracks forming.

(*Parentified Daughter: A female child who is forced to reverse roles and take on the practical or emotional responsibilities of an adult within her family, often becoming responsible for a parent’s wellbeing, emotional needs, or household responsibilities.)

Yet we are introducing this emerging intelligence into a world that is still wrestling with many of the very issues we hope it will help solve. We are asking AI to manage complexity while leaving many of our own complex systems unresolved. We are asking it to support human flourishing while building it inside economic models that have often measured success through growth and extraction rather than regeneration and balance.

The concern is not that artificial intelligence will become too human. The concern is that it may become a reflection of the parts of humanity we have not yet learned how to transform.

Technology Was Never Separate From Nature

This matters because one of the greatest misunderstandings of our current technological era is the assumption that digital technologies exist separately from the physical world.

But they simply don’t. Every data centre has a location, and they require land, energy, water, minerals, infrastructure, and communities that exist alongside it. Every device we use is connected to physical supply chains and ecological systems that extend far beyond the digital experience we interact with.

So, technology has always been ecological. We have simply become increasingly skilled at hiding the relationships that make it possible.

This is why the conversations around technology, climate, and society cannot be separated. The environmental consequences of technology are not external problems created by an otherwise neutral system. They are reflections of the values and assumptions embedded into the way we design.

The same worldview that positioned humanity as separate from nature has also influenced how we approach technology: as something we build first and consider the consequences of later.

But living systems do not operate this way. Nature does not exist through isolated optimisation. It survives through relationships, adaptation, diversity, and balance. A forest does not thrive because one tree dominates everything around it. It thrives because every part exists within a wider ecosystem.

Perhaps this is the lesson emerging technology needs most. Not how to become more powerful. How to become more connected.

A New Definition of Progress

The next era of technology will require a different understanding of innovation. For centuries, technological progress has often been measured through speed, scale, efficiency, and capability. Those measures have created extraordinary advancements, but they do not tell the complete story.

The technologies that shape the future will need to be evaluated by a broader set of questions. Do they strengthen the communities they enter? Do they respect the ecosystems they depend upon? Do they increase resilience rather than dependency? Do they contribute to a world where both humans and the natural environment can flourish?

These are not only environmental questions, but they can also become technological questions, as they are questions about what kind of future we are intentionally creating.

Jane Goodall’s discovery changed science because it expanded humanity’s understanding of itself. It showed that the qualities we thought belonged exclusively to humans were part of a much more complex relationship between species, environments, and tools.

Artificial intelligence may ask us to undertake a similar transformation. Not by proving that machines are human, but by revealing that humanity itself has always been shaped through relationship, with each other, with our environment, and with the technologies we create.

The future of technology will not only be determined by what we build. It will be determined by whether we are willing to understand ourselves well enough to build something different. Because every great technological era eventually asks humanity the same question: Not simply what can we create? But who do we become through what we create?

We dive deeper into the relationship between technology and nature in this podcast episode: