September 23, 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 RIGHT TO TALK TO A HUMAN
When the Machine Is Not Enough
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, Citizens Advice in Britain is calling for a “right to talk to a human” because people are becoming trapped in digital systems when they need essential services. At the United Nations this week, President Trump referred to artificial intelligence as what would be “hereinafter officially called ‘Super Intelligence.’” If machines are becoming increasingly capable of imitating human conversation, why are people demanding the human being back?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Because the human being began disappearing from communication long before the chatbot arrived. With the telegraph, information could travel without the body that produced it. The telephone detached the voice from the visible person. Electric media progressively turned us into images, voices, records, numbers and entries in data banks. In Professor McLuhan’s terms, man becomes increasingly discarnate, and the old embodied sense of identity gives way to mass man. Every technology gives us a representation of an event, and the representation is never a replica of the event itself. Only face-to-face communication gives us the complete human event, with the person physically present. Now we have taken another step. We are attempting to substitute a machine for even the distant human being. President Trump may call it “Super Intelligence,” but intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing. AI can imitate language, sympathy, memory and the outward signs of judgment, but an imitation of consciousness is not consciousness. However convincing the representation becomes, it is never the person.
That is why the demand to “talk to a human” is more profound than it sounds. And even a human voice is not enough if the employee is imprisoned inside the same categories and scripts as the machine. What people are really asking for is human presence joined to human discretion: someone who can recognize that a life does not fit the form, understand the exception and take responsibility for a judgment. Citizens Advice describes people becoming trapped in channels, looping chatbots and digital systems that cannot accommodate their circumstances. The person increasingly has to reshape his problem until the system can recognize it. There is a deep irony here. After more than a century of electric technology progressively removing the person from communication, we are now demanding that the person be put back. What we finally want is not a more convincing technological representation of one another. We want one another.
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Sources: Citizens Advice, “Behind digital walls: how people are being locked out of essential services,” September 22, 2026. President Donald J. Trump, remarks to the 81st United Nations General Assembly, September 22, 2026, as published by the White House.
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