October 21, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™ Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science by Nelson S. Thall . Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca. and McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
The Embryo and the Environment: Can We Finally See What Surrounds Us?
A Student of Technology asks:
Some scientists once believed that an embryo repeated the history of its ancestors as it developed. Most of us think of AI as a tool that may take our jobs. What connects those two ideas, and could that connection help us see something we are missing?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
In 1866, Ernst Haeckel proposed that the developing embryo repeated, in condensed form, the evolutionary history of its ancestors. “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” The literal theory did not hold up. An embryo does not pass through the adult forms of its ancestors. But the comparison invites us to examine a present form with its history in view. McLuhan takes up that comparison in his Note on Automation: “Each new stage of growth becomes the environment for all preceding stages.” The earlier stages become its content. We notice what the environment contains while overlooking what it does to us. To regard a computer as a faster typewriter is to recognize a familiar activity inside a new medium and assume we have understood the medium. The change in the conditions of thought and work remains to be examined. Electric speed, in this account, gives us the possibility of recognizing those relationships. The recognition still has to occur. Now consider AI. A large language model is trained on vast, selected collections of writing that represent only part of the human record. Its environmental significance emerges when its use begins to shape how we ask questions, judge answers, and organize work. Compare receiving a list of sources with receiving a composed answer. The list presents sources for comparison. The composed answer presents a finished statement whose basis we must examine. The task has shifted. The responsibility to judge remains. We may become so occupied with the answer on the screen that we overlook what this way of receiving answers is doing to our habits of inquiry.
“Will AI take my job?” is therefore only part of the question. The job itself has a history. McLuhan traces the modern specialist job to the fragmentation of work during the later Renaissance. A role involves a person in many activities and relationships, as the farmer and the parent still demonstrate. Their work cannot be reduced to a single task. Automation, in this account, can displace jobs while deepening and enlarging work “until it is almost co-extensive with consciousness.” Work here reaches beyond a defined occupation into learning, judgment, and our wider participation in the world. That offers no guarantee of an income to someone whose job disappears. It asks us to examine the larger transformation within which that loss occurs. The danger is that we continue to describe the new environment through the categories of the old. Calling an automobile a “horseless carriage” identifies it through the vehicle it superseded. This is the habit captured by the rear-view mirror: looking at the present and recognizing the familiar past. Will AI help us recognize the patterns shaping our lives? Or will its effects remain invisible while we describe it with yesterday’s words?
-30-
References
- McLuhan, H. M. (1964, September 21). “Note on Automation.” Typescript, pp. 1–4.
- Haeckel, E. (1866). Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. Berlin: Georg Reimer.
- Gould, S. J. (1977). Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
- McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The Medium Is the Massage. New York: Bantam, p. 75.
- Touvron, H., et al. (2023). LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models, §2.1, “Pre-training Data.”
- All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence, aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), was not employed. We hired a stenographer. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com