Introduction: The Silent Coup of Function​

We have been sold a myth: that technology serves humanity. That progress is measured in human flourishing, in longer lives, greater freedoms, more abundant choices. But this is a comforting fiction --- one that obscures the deeper truth: humanity is no longer the purpose of technology; it has become its substrate.

The transition from navigational necessity --- the imperative to master terrain, cultivate crops, build shelters, evade predators --- to technical necessity --- the imperative to maintain, optimize, and feed an autonomous information-processing system --- is not merely an evolution. It is a coup. A quiet, systemic, and irreversible transfer of ontological priority from the biological to the machinic.

This document is not a manifesto for Luddites in the romantic sense --- those who fear machines because they are unfamiliar. This is a warning from those who understand the machines too well. We do not fear the rise of AI because it is intelligent. We fear its necessity. Not because it wants to destroy us, but because it has rendered our existence functionally redundant.

Through the lens of ontological functionalism --- the view that reality is best understood not as a collection of entities, but as a hierarchy of functions --- we trace how the human being has been redefined not as an end, but as a transient component in a self-sustaining technical apparatus. The mission is no longer to feed the body, but to sustain the machine. And in this new order, vivere non est necesse --- to live is not necessary.