The NewYorkTimes.com reported “The relationship between mind and machine has long fascinated philosophers and scientists, who have likened the human brain to clocks, chronometers and, in more recent decades, computers. In the early days of artificial intelligence, academics referred cheekily to humans as “meat machines.”” The May 24, 2026 article entitled “To A.I. Executives, We’re All Just ‘Meat Computers’” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/business/meat-computer-brain-artificial-intelligence.html) included these comments from Reporter Lora Kelley:
This comparison of human and machine — and the suggestion that non-meat computers are superior — has not landed well with a public anxious about the A.I. future. It fits into a broader trend in which executives pit humans against robots and conclude that humans don’t quite measure up. When Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said in February that, while it takes electricity to train chatbots, “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” media outlets and social media users jumped on the comments as misanthropic and even dystopian.
People have long sought to “explain the mind through the most powerful technology we have,” said Raphaël Millière, an associate professor at the University of Oxford and affiliate of its Institute for Ethics in A.I. But lately, the meat computer metaphor has gone from an explanatory analogy to marketing language that aims to“move the public perception on how humanlike and intelligent frontier models are,” he said. Such comparisons can be disquieting for people, he added, partly because thinking of ourselves as meat is “grim” and dehumanizing.
Moo!
First published at https://www.vogelitlaw.com/blog/ai-has-turned-humans-into-just-meat-computers