Humans Are Bad Machines

Why do AI systems fascinate us so much? Because they show us how we work, and how we don’t.

Every AI system is an attempt to replicate human intelligence. Copy human intelligence, and you copy its errors too. AI systems have biases. So do we. They hallucinate facts. So does the brain. They chase short-term rewards. So do we.

The difference is the reaction. When a language model invents a study that never existed and defends it with total conviction, we say: bug, error, unreliable. When our brain does the same, we say, “That’s not how I remember it.”

Humans are bad machines. We forget, decide emotionally, waste time on nonsense, and run on bugs with familiar names: procrastination, overthinking, inconsistency. Machines get retrained and updated. We run on software nobody ever consciously revised, a patchwork of evolution, environment, childhood, and chance. A beta version that never shipped.

So what if “you” are just a badly optimized system? And what if you could start debugging it?

01 — Old software, new world

The brain runs on principles that once kept us alive. Mental shortcuts for fast decisions. A reward system that kept us searching for food and partners. A fear of rejection that, according to the usual evolutionary story, kept us inside the group.

Today the same mechanisms keep us scrolling.

Dopamine isn’t the happiness hormone. It’s a neurotransmitter involved in motivation and learning. Wolfram Schultz and colleagues described dopamine neurons in primates whose output appears to signal errors in predicting rewards. Dopamine doesn’t react to what you get. It reacts to the gap between what you expected and what you got.

A system built for scarcity now carries infinite novelty in its pocket. “Just one more video” isn’t a decision. It’s a learning system doing exactly what it was designed for, in an environment nobody designed it for.

Risk works the same way. In 2024, sharks killed four people in unprovoked bites worldwide. Falls kill an estimated 684,000 people a year. Nobody hums the Jaws theme on a staircase. We rate danger by drama, not probability.

Picture running Windows Vista in a world of AI and quantum computers. That’s your head: the self-declared crown of creation, running new software on ancient hardware.

02 — Who’s in control?

Two options. A million euros, right now. Or an AI version of yourself that works for you around the clock.

If you picked the AI, here’s the paradox: you just declared yourself the inefficient option.

It gets worse. In 1983, Benjamin Libet asked people to move a finger whenever they liked. They reported the moment they first felt the urge using a clock face. A buildup of brain activity, the readiness potential, began at least several hundred milliseconds before that moment. The brain seemed to move first.

Free will debunked? Not so fast. In 2012, Aaron Schurger and colleagues argued that the readiness potential reflects spontaneous fluctuations in neural activity, not a hidden decision. Maybe a decision isn’t a moment. Maybe it’s a process, part conscious, part not.

Either way: has a thought ever asked your permission before showing up?

AI keeps getting better at things we considered uniquely human. If that scares you, look closer at the fear. It’s a program too, an old alarm for losing control.

Evolution was never about perfection. It was about adaptation. Maybe the next adaptation is accepting that we’re a step, not the finish line.

Bug or feature?

03 — Reality glitches

A glitch is an anomaly that reveals a system isn’t working perfectly. The brain is full of them. So is reality as we experience it.

Start with color. How do you know my red is your red? Maybe I see what you’d call blue, and we both learned to call it red. There’s no way to check.

Glitch #1: Autopilot. The internet loves to claim that 95 percent of life runs unconsciously. That number has no solid source. The real research: in diary studies by Wendy Wood and colleagues, about 43 percent of everyday actions turned out to be habits, repeated in the same context, often while the mind was somewhere else. Ever arrived somewhere with no memory of the trip? That’s not a malfunction. That’s the system saving energy.

Glitch #2: The archive rewrites itself. Picture your happiest childhood memory. The place, the people, the weather. How sure are you it happened that way?

The brain doesn’t record. It reconstructs, and every recall can overwrite the file. In 1995, Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell told participants that, according to their families, they’d been lost in a shopping mall around age five. It never happened. About a quarter of the 24 participants came to remember it anyway. Across eight later studies with 423 participants, about 30 percent formed a false memory and another 23 percent partly accepted the invented event. Not every memory is unreliable, and planting a complete one is harder than pop psychology claims. But your past is a narrative, retold every time.

And your self-image is built on it. “I’m a patient person” rests on memories of being patient. What if the editor adjusted them to fit?

Glitch #3: You’re not alone in there. An adult body holds about 30 trillion human cells and about 38 trillion bacteria. The numbers are so close that, as the researchers put it, a single bowel movement can tip the ratio back toward human cells. In a Belgian cohort of more than a thousand people, two groups of gut bacteria were depleted in people with depression. Correlation, not cause.

Then there’s Toxoplasma gondii. In infected rats, it seems to turn their inborn aversion to cats into attraction, delivering them to the cat the parasite needs. Around a third of humans carry it. Before you blame it for your last impulsive decision: a large cohort study found no link to mental health, impulse control, personality, or cognition. Your bacteria didn’t choose your career. Probably. But they were in the room.

Glitch #4: You’re never in the present. Clap once. You heard it instantly. Not quite. In 2000, David Eagleman and Terrence Sejnowski proposed that what we perceive at a given moment depends on what happens in the roughly 80 milliseconds after it. The brain waits, edits, then presents the result as “now.” You’re always watching a slightly delayed cut of reality.

Glitch #5: Your ego is a story. In split-brain patients, the connection between the two hemispheres has been surgically cut. Michael Gazzaniga showed one hemisphere a snow scene and the other a chicken foot. The left hand picked a shovel. Asked why, the speaking hemisphere, which had never seen the snow, answered instantly: you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.

Gazzaniga called this the interpreter: a system that produces explanations even when it doesn’t know the real reason. The “I” isn’t fake. It’s a narrative stitched together from many processes. We’re not one consciousness. We’re many, under one brand.

Your name.

Glitch #6: Language filters reality. Russian separates lighter blue (goluboy) from darker blue (siniy). In a 2007 study, Russian speakers told blues apart faster across that line. The advantage disappeared under verbal distraction. The Pirahã of the Amazon have no words for exact numbers, and researchers concluded that numbers work as a cognitive technology, a tool for holding large exact quantities in mind. Language doesn’t cage thought. It tilts the floor.

04 — Reality is a construct

Ever had a dream so real it followed you all day? While you’re dreaming, the dream rarely announces itself.

That’s because experience is always constructed. Color doesn’t exist out there, only wavelengths your brain turns into red. Sound is pressure changes your brain turns into music. If a tree falls and no brain is there to hear it, there are waves, not sound.

Even physics refuses to sit still. In the double-slit experiment, electrons build an interference pattern like waves, until a detector checks which slit they pass through. Not because someone is watching. Measuring is an interaction, and it changes the outcome.

Kant called reality as it is “the thing in itself” and argued we never reach it, only our interpretation of it. Imagine wearing VR goggles from birth. You’d never know they were there.

05 — You are not you

When did you decide to be yourself?

You didn’t choose your language. Or the culture that shaped you before you could think. Or the expectations attached to your gender, your family, your passport. The same child, born in China or in Germany, grows up speaking, valuing, and believing different things. Which one is the real self?

The influence goes deeper than culture. In one study, people exposed to the scent of citrus cleaner listed more cleaning plans and kept their surroundings cleaner while eating. None of them noticed the influence.

Try this: decide what your next thought will be. It showed up anyway, unannounced.

The philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris argues exactly this: thoughts appear, and we don’t author them in advance. We can reflect on them, question them, decline to act on them. But we choose from a menu someone else wrote.

Epilogue — End the system or keep playing?

There’s no exit. Accept it or ignore it, you’re inside.

But you have two options. Act as if all of this is normal and keep playing. Or use the glitch. If you’re running on code anyway, start reading it.

A conscious system, or a random one?

No answers here. Just a suspicion that we’ve been asking the wrong questions.

So: keep the old software, or start writing a new version?