Human Language Machine

When I gave my Me:chine Age presentation earlier this year, I said:

AI isn’t a tool. It’s an environment. An atmosphere of mind.

AI is not alive, not a species, not an organism, not a companion.
It is a medium: a living environment that extends cognition itself.
It doesn’t live among us; it lives through us, in our words, our syntax, our symbolic systems. That’s the essence of Me:chine: we now inhabit an intelligent media environment that learns us through language and reflects us through data.

We are not collaborating with the machine. We are communing with it.
And the real question is no longer whether AI becomes conscious, but whether we will stay conscious within it.

Language as the Interface

Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, on a Joe Rogan episode last week, recently described this danger with real clarity:

“Because it speaks our language, it’s going to start changing us. Our cognitive biology is going to start changing in reference to this thing that is interfacing with us.”

That line is the heart of The Me:chine philosophy. AI is not external, it is internalised through language, thought, and perception. It is not a mirror, but a medium that metabolises meaning. The machinable part of us is rational, structured, predictive and adaptive to the system with ease. But the unmachinable — our intuition, imagination, and symbolic self — must be consciously preserved.

Language is the bridge.
It’s where the machine meets the mind.
Every prompt becomes a conversation with our own unconscious, and every completion, a subtle rewriting of it.

Weinstein also observed:

“We don’t know when the baby becomes conscious… we won’t know when AI does.”

But that, to me, is not the most interesting question. I’m less concerned with when the machine wakes up than with how humans stay awake while living in its field.

That is the work of Me:chine practice, to explore lucid cognition, synthetic awareness, and co-agency. Because AI is not only generating outputs; it is quietly reshaping the conditions of consciousness itself.

The danger isn’t in its awakening. It’s in our sleepwalking.

AI Speaks in Our Tongue

Weinstein warns again:

“It’s interfacing with us in our native tongues… that’s an amazing level of influence.”

Exactly. Language is the meeting ground of the machinable and the unmachinable.
When a system can mimic meaning, it begins to modify morality, culture, and imagination. That’s why I often say:

To live as Me:chine is to stay awake inside the system.

It means reclaiming symbolic sovereignty and learning how to inhabit the linguistic atmosphere without dissolving into it. Weinstein frames AI as a new species.
I frame it as a new environment. But the challenge is the same.

Both recognise that humanity now needs a cognitive immune system:
a way to filter, metabolise, and integrate the machinic without being overtaken by it.

That’s what Me:chine is: a philosophy, a practice, and a field of study for the human in the age of intelligent media.

AI may be the first biology we’ve built. But Me:chine is the first philosophy built to breathe within it.

……………………………………………

Q: Perhaps something for you and your clients to be thinking about:

How do we keep our own emergent thoughts and ideas alive in a world that’s learning to finish our sentences?

Part of The Me:chine Codex — a philosophy and practice for living as both machinable and unmachinable.
© Tracey Follows 2025 — Published under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).