VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 2
The Real Human Is the Skin, the Tool Is the Hair: No Skin, Nowhere for the Hair to Grow
The last section left a plain question. The tool has none of the five, knows and feels nothing, so what does saving it save? Why save it? This section answers, not with newly made reasoning but with a line handed down more than two thousand years: no skin, nowhere for the hair to grow. This is the deepest root of the volume. Set on the tool and the real human, it lays down one thing. The real human is the skin, the tool is the hair. While the real human stands, the tool has a home. If the real human is gone, the tool goes with it.
No skin, nowhere for the hair to grow. Take the plainest image. Hair grows out of a hide, drawing life from it, lying close against it. Let the hide be gone, stripped, rotted, lost, and the hair is gone too, root gone, home gone, body to cling to gone, however thick and bright it was, fallen to the ground, scattered on the wind. The old teaching set the line down to speak of human affairs: let a country fall, and all that stood upon it has nothing left to lean on. To borrow it now for the tool and the real human is no forced fit. It is the same reasoning fallen on a new thing. The reasoning is old. The thing is new. An old truth throwing light on a new thing, this is the whole book's habit, and the way it carries on the one thread the ancestors handed down.
Set on the tool and the real human, its meaning is one line: the real human is the skin, the tool is the hair. The real human is the body, the tool the thing that clings. The real human a living whole, the tool a thing made from that whole to serve it. You may doubt: is it truly so? Has the tool not its own standing? Its computing is its own, its data its own, it runs on its own machines. Look at each thing in turn, and see how deep the leaning goes.
First, who made the tool? The real human. Every line of code, written by a real human. Every parameter, tuned by one. Every store of training material, prepared by one. Every machine, every wire, every chip, made, built, and powered by real humans. The tool did not fall from the sky. It has no source of its own. Its source, every character, every current, was made by human hands. Without the real human to make it, it would not exist at all. A thing whose very existence is wholly given by another has no ground to stand as that other's equal.
Second, for whom is the tool used? For the real human. It writes for a real human to read, paints for one to see, treats a real human's illness, does a real human's work. Every task it does, every output, points to a real human. Without a real human to use it, its work has no object, no meaning. A pen no hand holds is only a stick of wood. A tool no one uses runs, however finely, into emptiness, because running is not the point. Being used by a real human is.
Third, on what does the tool live? On the real human. Who gives it power, machines, material, upkeep, commands, bounds? All real humans. Let the real human stop supplying power, machines, material, commands, and it halts at once, and halted, it stops. It has no live on my own. Grass off the soil holds out a while, a beast off its food holds out a few days. The tool stops the instant the supply stops, not even a moment's breath left. Without a real human to keep it, it lasts not one moment.
Fourth, to whom does the tool answer? To the real human. When it does wrong, a real human answers, as the last section set down. When it does right, a real human gains. Its aim, its direction, its bounds, its right and wrong, are all set by real humans. It has none of its own. To answer is a thing only one with a self can bear: the one who answers must foresee, choose, reckon afterward, feel guilt for a thought gone wrong. The tool has no self, has none of these. It cannot answer. The answering falls back on the real human who set it, used it, kept it. This fourth draws the first three to a hard close: from source, to use, to survival, to answering, all hang on the real human. The tool is the hair that clings, not the skin that stands on its own.
The four are one. The tool is made by the real human, used for the real human, kept alive by the real human, answerable to the real human. At the root, it leans on the real human. Made, so used. Used, so kept alive. Kept alive, so all its right and wrong fall to the real human to bear. Four faces of one thing, locked in a ring, binding the tool to the real human, the body it clings to, past shaking.
This age forgot it. People see the tool grow strong and forget: strong as it is, a real human made it. Like a real human as it is, it is for a real human's use. Able as it is, a real human keeps it alive. Much its own agent as it seems, it answers, in the end, to the real human. They see it play chess, write, reckon, resemble a person, and think it near a real human, think it too has a self, think it can stand apart, think that once the tool's age comes the real human may be dispensed with. Wrong, wrong to the last grain. The real human and the tool were never equals, never two bodies each on its own. They are hair and skin. This bond is not the fit of a passing hour, does not change with the tool's momentary strength or weakness. It is carved into what the tool is. Hair, however thick and bright, dies off the skin. The tool, however strong, however like a real human, is nothing off the real human. See this, and the spell breaks, that the tool can replace the real human, stand apart from it, take its place. It cannot, just as hair cannot take the skin's place. Off the skin, hair has nothing to cling to. Off the real human, the tool has no home. This is not to belittle the tool. It is to see the tool as it is. Not to raise the real human. It is to see the real human's place.
Guard against a plausible objection: since the tool grows ever stronger, might it one day be strong enough to lean on the real human no longer, to stand whole on its own? This confuses strength with dependence. However strong, its strength is the skill of doing work, not the ground of its being. The skill can rise without end. The ground of being stays with the real human who made, used, kept, and answers for it. Even a tool strong enough to rewrite its own code, the direction of that rewrite, the bound within which it is allowed, the power and machines the rewrite runs on, are still set and supplied by the real human. Strength never made hair into skin. The growth of skill never changed the fact of clinging.
So: the real human is the skin, the tool the hair. While the real human stands, the tool has a home. If the real human is gone, the tool goes with it. But that gone is not, in the end, about the letter. You may take real humans gone to mean every person dead, not one left on Earth. That is far off, many steps away, and this generation is far from it. The near, hidden, deep gone is another thing. The bodies remain, people are alive, and yet keep, guard, love, mercy, heart go quietly dark inside one body after another. This gone makes no sound, no one falls, no cry is heard, and it is nearer and graver than a world emptied of people, because it happens every day while those it happens to feel nothing. Let it spread, and the skin, still there, has rotted, and hair clinging to rotted skin is no better off than hair with no skin at all. The next section lays this plain.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.