CONCEPT
HUMANS ARE ORGANISMS
The alternative frame to HUMANS ARE ARTIFACTS — reconceiving human value from function to capacity, from utility to flourishing, from competition with machines to cultivation of what machines do not possess.
HUMANS ARE ORGANISMS is the conceptual frame Lakoff's framework proposes as the structural alternative to the ARTIFACT frame that generates the twelve-year-old's question "What am I for?" An organism is not designed for a purpose. An organism has capacities — for growth, for adaptation, for experience, for relationship, for the continuous interaction with an environment that constitutes being alive. An organism's value is not determined by a function it fulfills. An organism does not become obsolete when a machine performs a task more efficiently, because the organism's value was never located in the task. The frame generates fundamentally different questions: not "What am I for?" but "What kind of life do I want to live?" Not "Am I useful?" but "Am I growing?" Not "Can the machine do what I do?" but "What do I want to cultivate that the machine cannot cultivate for me?"
In The You On AI Field Guide
The frame it replaces — HUMANS ARE ARTIFACTS — is so deeply embedded
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