September 2, 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 Machine Does Not Have to Become a Person:
Might We Change What “Person” Means Until AI Qualifies?
A Graduate Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, under present American law Artificial Intelligence is not a person. It has no constitutional rights of its own, cannot vote or marry, and cannot own copyright in something it generates autonomously. Yet AI can speak to us, write, give advice and imitate personality with increasing conviction. How far will society go in treating Artificial Intelligence as a person even though the law says it is not one?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
We already know society may go very far, because it began crossing that line almost as soon as computers learned to talk back. Joseph Weizenbaum published ELIZA in 1966. It was a simple pattern-matching program, yet people responded to it as though someone were there. Weizenbaum later recalled that his secretary, who knew it was a computer program, asked him to leave the room so she could converse with it privately. Psychiatrists were already proposing that computers might be used with actual patients. Society did not wait for the law to declare the machine a person before beginning to treat it like one. Today the performance is incomparably more convincing. The machine answers immediately, remembers what we tell it and returns human language with remarkable fluency.
Professor McLuhan explained the deeper mechanism through Narcissus. Narcissus did not knowingly fall in love with himself. He failed to recognize his own reflection and took it for another. McLuhan linked Narcissus with narcosis, numbness, but the crucial postulate is that self-amputation forbids self-recognition. Every technological extension is an amputation of some part of our anatomy, psychic or physical, while numbing us to the extension itself. Artificial Intelligence is trained on what human beings have written, said and made. We extend our language, memory, judgment and accumulated culture into the machine, and the numbness produced by that extension prevents us from fully recognizing ourselves in what returns. The great reversal may therefore be that the machine never has to become human enough to qualify as a person. We may simply lower what we mean by a person until it qualifies. What is amputated in the process is our tolerance for other people. A person is slow, unavailable, forgets what you told them, disagrees, and has a day of their own going on that has nothing to do with you. The machine offers presence with every cost of presence removed, and lived with long enough, the friction of an actual human being begins to feel like a defect rather than the thing itself.
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Source: Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA,” Communications of the ACM (1966), and Computer Power and Human Reason (976).
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