By Jakob Lusensky

I’m Not a Machine

Jung, artificial intelligence and psychological maturity.

The last recorded interview with Jung took place just a few months before his death. It was with a young Finnish journalist for the Finnish national broadcaster. The conversation is at once insightful, charming, and at times rather comical.

The interviewer appears unprepared and speaks with an accent that Jung occasionally struggles to understand (and vice versa). The tape recorder repeatedly malfunctions, and Jung grows increasingly irritated by the technology. At one point he exclaims:

“I’m not a machine. I don’t respect machines.”

To which the journalist responds:

“But machines are everywhere today.”

Jung replies:

“Flea and lice are everywhere. I don’t pay my respect to them. I don’t allow them to dictate my behavior.”

Jung wrote surprisingly little about technology, yet this brief exchange captures a deep skepticism found throughout much of his later work. His concern was not technology itself, but how our relationship to it gradually reshapes the human mind. In his late essay The Undiscovered Self (1957), which also comes up during the interview, Jung expresses this concern more directly:

“In reality man is the slave and victim of the machines that have conquered space and time for him” (Jung, 1970b, §524).

The paradox is striking. As Jung continues, “All his achievements and possessions do not make him bigger; on the contrary, they diminish him.” These are remarks worth pondering today, especially as artificial intelligence intervenes ubiquitously in our everyday lives and algorithms learn to seek to satisfy our longings and needs more intimately.

Technological adolescence

A few years after this interview, in his influential book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan drew on Jung to explore precisely this psychological paradox. Writing at a time when television and electronic media were transforming everyday life, McLuhan argued that technology does not merely extend our human capacities but also changes us in the process.

To illustrate this, he turns to an observation Jung makes about ancient Rome: although the Roman masters appeared powerful, they were themselves gradually transformed by the institution of slavery.

Jung writes:

Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology.

Jung’s observation is not without its difficulties. The historical reality of slavery, built upon violence and the denial of human freedom, cannot be equated with our relationship to technology.

Yet the psychological insight McLuhan draws from Jung remains relevant: when we become too dependent on others, or increasingly on machines, to perform essential human tasks, we become unconsciously shaped by that very dependence.

McLuhan’s famous dictum, the medium is the message, points to a similar psychological truth. Every technological extension risks becoming a psychological amputation, as we begin projecting, and eventually outsourcing, our most human capacities, especially our thinking and imagination, to the very tools we have created.

In our own time, Dario Amodei, founder of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, has suggested that humanity has now entered an age of technological adolescence. Through this new technology, we possess powers previous generations could scarcely imagine, yet remain uncertain how to use them wisely.

Amodei’s concerns are governance, safety, and who remains in control of these increasingly powerful systems. These are essential questions, yet they leave open another, older question that Jung had already posed in The Undiscovered Self:

So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man.... Does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scales?

If it is true that we stand at the dawn of a new industrial revolution, and that this new technology is only in its adolescence, the natural questions that follow are these:

How do we psychologically mature and become adults? What kind of human being is capable of carrying these new technological powers?

Psychological Maturity

To Jung, this question ultimately became religious. To mature psychologically and resist turning into the tools we use, we need to develop a religious attitude. This means orienting ourselves toward that which truly transcends us, before which the ego learns to bow and we all stand as equals. As Jung puts it:

“The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world.”
(§511)

Jung is proposing something more enduring than passing numinous experiences: a religious attitude, an anchoring in God that allows us to live more freely in the world.

Such faith goes hand in hand with the continuous work of self-knowledge. Analysis can help us recognize our projections, look honestly in the mirror, and begin to integrate the shadow we so readily see in our neighbour.

Together, this inner anchoring and willingness to know ourselves form a foundation for psychological maturity. For human beings to remain inwardly free in a time of constant turmoil, growing polarization and accelerating technology. Not unconsciously dependent on machines, but consciously dependent on one another.

From the upcoming essay Living from the Centre, exploring Jung’s religious attitude in an age of AI.

References

Amodei, D. (2026, January). The adolescence of technology: Confronting and overcoming the risks of powerful AI. https://darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology

Jung, C. G. (1970). The undiscovered self (present and future). In Civilization in transition (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., 2nd ed., Collected Works, Vol. 10, paras. 488–588). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1957)

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw-Hill.

Nordenstreng, K. (1961, February). Interview with Carl Gustav Jung [Audio recording]. Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle). https://sites.tuni.fi/kaarle/interview-with-carl-gustav-jung/