Zeno

Artificiality

Human inventions are shaped by the natural world—technology must align with the forces and constraints of nature to harness its power. For example, boats are designed to minimise friction in water, their form directly influenced by natural principles. The same is true for many pre-industrial inventions, such as houses that harmonise with the local climate and materials, working with the elements to keep occupants warm and dry.

However, as society advances and refashions the natural world, dominating rather than coexisting with nature, our inventions increasingly reflect the artificial environments we create. They adapt to human-engineered systems rather than the natural world. Instead of developing technologies that integrate with nature, we now build technologies that integrate with other technologies, infrastructure, and societal frameworks. Their forms no longer bear the imprint of nature. Cars, for example, are designed for roads, not rivers or fields. By contrast, an old sailboat is a near-symbiosis of human ingenuity and natural forces.

This growing distance from nature can be observed in many modern inventions; houses are now designed to fit into vast urban grids rather than blend with natural landscapes, their forms dictated by laws and regulations rather than the forces of nature. Technology of old was fundamentally grounded in nature, rooted in reality, while new technology strays away from it's roots and becomes alien to the natural world, including us. We are pieces of the natural world, placed into a new sphere of artificiality, and so the distance from the natural world is also a distance from humanity. The world is becoming less human.

Modern inventions prioritise efficiency within a constructed framework that often stands in opposition to nature. As this trend continues, our society’s development will grow increasingly detached from the natural world, becoming more abstract and artificial. The imprint of nature on our creations will fade as we diverge further from the environment that originally shaped us.