Who Is the “Us” That AI Is Supposed to Kill?
This might sound like an odd question, but stay with me. For years, we’ve been told that artificial intelligence will eventually turn against us. From The Terminator to The Matrix to iRobot, the narrative is always the same: machines rise up, and humanity pays the price.
But there’s a foundational flaw buried in that assumption. It’s the belief that AI and humans are fundamentally separate, and that the coming battle will be “them vs. us” — with us defined as humanity.
What if AI and human agents aren’t two distinct species in conflict, but part of a shared, non-binary system of categorization? What if, instead of drawing a line between AI and humans, we acknowledge a spectrum?
MAT is a structural classification system — a metadata label that defines cognitive agents not by behavior or allegiance, but by their physical and cognitive composition.
But most future agents won’t sit neatly at either end. The space between 0.0 and 1.0 is filled with nuance: AI-augmented humans, brain–computer hybrids, distributed cognitive collectives, and more.
