14 years ago, Steve Mann told me that technology that masters nature is not sustainable.
At the time, that sounded like the poetic caution of a man the media had nicknamed “the cyborg Luddite.” Today it reads like a weather report.
Steve is the person the IEEE named the father of wearable computing. He built the EyeTap decades before Google Glass, invented HDR imaging now sitting in the phone in your pocket, and was called the world’s first cyborg. So when he argues for using less, for choosing which technologies to embrace and which to walk away from, he is not speaking from fear of the machine. He is speaking from a deeper intimacy with it than almost anyone alive.
His core move was to refuse the framing everyone else accepted.
Not more technology. Not less technology. Appropriate technology. Balanced with nature instead of replacing it.
And here is the line that has aged into something close to prophecy:
“The only way we are ever going to understand AI is through HI.”
Humanistic Intelligence. Not artificial intelligence that displaces the human, but technology that extends what the human already is. In 2012, that was a philosophical footnote. In 2026, as we pour oceans of water and gigawatts of power into models built to replace human judgment rather than sharpen it, it is the whole argument.
Steve saw the fork in the road before most of us knew we were on a road.
The technology is only ever the How. What we choose to master, and what we choose to live in balance with, is still the Why. That decision was never going to be made by the machine. It was always going to be made by us.
This conversation is 14 years old, and I would not change a word of it.
Watch or listen to the full conversation with Steve Mann here: [ https://snglrty.co/462shOK](https://snglrty.co/462shOK)
#ArtificialIntelligence #Sustainability #Futurism #WearableTech #HumanisticIntelligence
What does the cyborg Luddite — Steve Mann, think about technology, nature and the technological singularity? Check out his interview on SingularityWeblog.com to find out.