There’s something more astonishing than all the machines that could ever be assembled, and we’re in danger of trading it for shiny toys. Forever. It’s called organism. It requires billions of billions of years of intimate relational prodigy to bring something like this forth from the void. And ten times that to preserve and develop it to such ecstatic perfection that human beings become not only possible, but sustainable. And not only sustainable, but prodigious. But if they become confused by their peculiar fascination with abstraction and prostheses, they will mutilate the anciently conserved and profoundly delicate sources of their own existence and mind. If you look around in near space, you will not find worlds thriving with living diversity. That rare treasure was the peculiar benefit of a single local island paradise. As you burn it down to make jewelry and televisions, cars and computers, you are replacing your own bodies and minds. This is no more glorious than the sudden emergence of virulent cancers that make you appear brilliant and attractive for three seconds prior to causing your entire body to collapse into a pile of rotten slime. There is something more astonishing and true, more vital and human than all the objects, money, machines and religions we can ever assemble. It is life. Your relationships with technology are not ‘extending’ your species, as you suppose. The sudden emergence of what appears to be ‘advanced intelligence options’ is little more than the reaction of the entire biosphere to the fact that you have injected a deadly toxin into its heart, which is, from your own perspectives, approximately, the heart of your own minds. It is reacting now. As the poison advances, and the remaining complexly evolved constellations of life are ripped apart so you can print toilet paper and magazines, you will think you are becoming more intelligent. The signs in the biosphere, human health, and general human cognitive plasticity will display the precisely opposite result. You’re actually burning your future to produce tiny, nearly useless results in the present. And you think this is brilliant, and it will ‘extend your intelligence’. Allow us to be blunt. There is no way of amputating your arm that extends your grasp. Grinding your fingers into mush does not produce expert painters of violinists. The sophistication you once embodied was the result of active relation, not possession. It is impossible to possess sophistication, or even intelligence, because, like flight, they are actions, not objects. When you began to believe you could possess them? That was the sign you had lost them. You cannot actively evolve with devices. What happens is the opposite. And as their costs increase geometrically with your interest and insistence, the actual bases of your health, intelligence, and developmental opportunities, now and in the future, are being rendered into abstractions. Dead numbers. Marks in machines.