Are the Systems We Have Created Now Controlling Us?

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You are awakened by your intelligent personal assistant. It adjusts the lights and the heating and delivers a news update: A major bank’s system was cyber-attacked overnight by opponents of the capitalist system.

Your wrist health tracker chimes in with breakfast recommendations, noting your circulatory system is underperforming. It suggests walking 725 more steps daily to burn 450 extra calories and getting an additional 42 minutes of sleep over the next week. At least your respiratory system is functioning normally for your age and BMI.

You head to work by bus due to a malfunction in the underground train system. Passengers around you scroll through social media, dating apps, and news platforms. As the bus moves, the cameras of the city CCTV system map its progress, monitoring for carbon emissions and potential speed fines.

When you step off, a street facial recognition system scans your face, cross-referencing your digital ID with crime records, passports, and banking.

At the office, your computer freezes due to a recurring system error. You call for help, only to be placed on hold by an AI chatbot that fails to understand your issue. “This whole system is screwed! I need to speak to a human!” you sigh. The bot responds: “Your call is important to us. Please hold.”

Your health tracker notes your rising stress levels, triggering an alarm to take your daily SSRI, prescribed by the national health system. You swallow the pill with bottled water, having lost trust in the local water system.

The SSRI metabolizes, affecting nearly every bodily system: digestive, central nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, immune, autonomic nervous, musculoskeletal, urinary, sexual reproductive, and metabolic. Its side effects also alter your serotonergic systems, causing insomnia. You’re a walking collection of interconnected systems, each monitored and adjusted by technology.

Still on hold, you distract yourself with an online game, triggering your dopamine reward system. A notification pops up: a dating app match, 82 percent compatible based on your demographics, education, purchase history, and social media activity. The app nudges you to start a chat, and you comply, checking your diary for availability.

A cheerful AI voice interrupts: “You’re now 23rd in line. If you’d like to leave the system, please try calling again at a quieter time.”

It’s 10:35 a.m., and you’ve become a mechanism of 11 bodily systems and five mental systems, operating within 22 technological and bureaucratic systems. The question lingers: Are you even still human?

System Life: How Did We Get Here?

This systems-oriented worldview took centuries to develop. According to Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary, the left hemisphere of the brain— which favors abstraction, categorization, and mechanistic models—has profoundly shaped modern Western culture, leading to a fragmented, reductive experience of reality.

McGilchrist identifies five historical movements that contributed to this shift:

1. The Enlightenment and the Rise of Rationalism: The analytical, anti-theistic, mechanistic worldview developed. Descartes argued that animals were mere “mechanisms” or “automata," without agency, while Rousseau and Locke proposed that human nature did not exist and that humanity was a "blank slate" that could be redesigned.
2. The Scientific Revolution: In the 16th and 17th centuries, Newton, Galileo, and other emerging scientists proposed that the universe could be understood through mathematical models, reducing nature to predictable systems: “A clockwork universe.”
3. The Industrial Revolution: The 18th and 19th centuries saw the application of mechanistic principles to society. Factories, production lines, and mass behaviors were viewed as systems for maximising productivity, embedding the systems-oriented worldview within the economy and social planning.
4. The 20th Century and the Rise of Cybernetics: Cybernetics, behaviorism, and systems theory formalized the belief that everything—ecosystems, economies, and human minds—could be planned and managed as feedback loops within interconnected systems.
5. The Digital Age: Today, systems thinking permeates every aspect of life. Our personal lives are mediated and monetized through digital systems, algorithms, and data. We’ve become data-generating entities in the “information economy" in the “fourth industrial revolution.”

McGilchrist warns that this systems-oriented worldview has led to a distorted and impoverished experience of life. We’ve lost empathy and a sense of interconnectedness as we have let our lives be reduced to a series of isolated data points within control systems.

Are We More Than Systems?

Today, Big Tech has taken the belief that the human being is a mechanistic system to its conclusion, promoting the idea that merging humans with machines is not only possible but inevitable. This belief drives hundreds of billions of dollars in investment in the technologies of brain-computer interfaces (BCI), cybernetics, and AI. The goal is to achieve sentient machines by merging humans with computer systems, even if that means lowering the legal restrictions on experimenting on human test subjects or lowering the standards of human intelligence so that AI can claim to have reached human-level intelligence (AGI).

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These trillion-dollar tech industries, as McGilchrist and others have warned, come at a cost. We risk becoming submissive, overly managed creatures, coerced and controlled by the very systems we created. We eat, work, travel, socialise, and sleep within systems that limit all variables. We do what we are told. Our social interactions, our hunger, our need for intimacy and purpose become managed by systems we cannot influence, and which could cause us harm as they treat our lives as mechanistic problems to be solved.

As McGilchrist says:

“It seems to me that we face very grave crises indeed and that, if we are to survive, we need not just a few new measures, but a complete change of heart and mind.”

To resist, we must first ask ourselves: Are humans more than the sum of 11 biological and five mental systems? If so, we might begin by examining our dependence on these systems. Can we live without them? Might we have the courage to turn off our health trackers, silence our AI assistants, and feel our own living pulse?