{"id":50198,"date":"2026-05-25T09:23:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T09:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/50198\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T09:23:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T09:23:18","slug":"to-a-i-executives-were-all-just-meat-computers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/50198\/","title":{"rendered":"To A.I. Executives, We\u2019re All Just \u2018Meat Computers\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> referred cheekily to humans as \u201cmeat machines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lately this framing has trickled into the vernacular of tech executives. Elon Musk posted<\/a> on social media last summer, \u201cWe are all dumb meat computers compared to digital superintelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andrej Karpathy, an A.I. executive and a founder of OpenAI, wrote in a widely read post<\/a> that \u201cA.I. research used to be done by meat computers in between eating, sleeping, having other fun, and synchronizing once in a while using sound wave interconnect in the ritual of \u2018group meeting.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThat era is long gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Larry Ellison, a co-founder and the executive chairman of Oracle, said<\/a> in a 2025 event: \u201cThe brain is very specialized. So are the A.I. models. But we\u2019re not building a 20-watt meat computer. We\u2019re building a 1.2 billion-watt A.I. brain.\u201d<\/p>\n

How it\u2019s pronounced<\/p>\n

\/m\u0113t k\u0259m-py\u00fc-t\u0259r\/<\/p>\n

This comparison of human and machine \u2014 and the suggestion that non-meat computers are superior \u2014 has not landed well<\/a> 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\u2019t quite measure up. When Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said in February that, while it takes electricity to train chatbots, \u201cit also takes a lot of energy to train a human,\u201d media outlets<\/a> and social media<\/a> users jumped on the comments as misanthropic and even dystopian.<\/p>\n

People have long sought to \u201cexplain the mind through the most powerful technology we have,\u201d said Rapha\u00ebl Milli\u00e8re, 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 \u201cmove the public perception on how humanlike and intelligent frontier models are,\u201d he said. Such comparisons can be disquieting for people, he added, partly because thinking of ourselves as meat is \u201cgrim\u201d and dehumanizing.<\/p>\n

Likening A.I. systems to human ones suggests that \u201cif artificial systems are now as good as brains or better, then we should treat them with the same respect\u201d as humans, said Rosa Cao, a philosopher at Stanford studying the relationship between natural and artificial intelligence \u2014 and that would imply that the creators of the technology should get major admiration, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe brain,\u201d said Josh Redstone, a philosopher at Carleton University, \u201cis probably one of the most, if not the most, complicated objects in the known universe.\u201d Any analogy to machines fails to capture how sophisticated our brains are. And though some philosophers (including him) find the meat analogy helpful, many members of the general public don\u2019t like to think of humankind in this way: The analogy, he said, \u201cmisses what we think is special about ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2022, in response to another executive\u2019s posts about humans and A.I., Mr. Musk invoked meat in a more oblique way. \u201cOur computer is made of meat!\u201d he posted<\/a>, and linked to a 1991 short story<\/a>, \u201cThey\u2019re Made Out of Meat,\u201d by Terry Bisson.<\/p>\n

In the story, two interplanetary visitors are shocked to find that humans can use their meaty brains to think: \u201cThinking meat! You\u2019re asking me to believe in thinking meat!\u201d one says to another. \u201cYes, thinking meat! Conscious meat!\u201d the other alien responds, adding: \u201cThe meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?\u201d<\/p>\n