The Drift of Embodiment: How Knowledge Became Prosthetic

The Drift of Embodiment: How Knowledge Became Prosthetic

By Brent Antonson

In the fifteenth century, two men kneel over geometry. One sketches a circle in the dirt; the other measures its angles with a wooden compass. To them, mathematics isn’t a subject—it’s a sacred act. To trace a line is to imitate the laws of creation.

We’ve come a long way from that hillside.
Today, every child carries in their pocket a computer powerful enough to simulate Galileo’s universe in real time. We can calculate orbits, predict eclipses, and map the cosmos with precision the ancients could only dream of. Yet, paradoxically, we’ve lost something along the way.

We’ve traded ability for access.
We know everything, but can’t do much without batteries.
If you left most of us in the woods for a weekend, our encyclopedic minds would starve before our phones died.

The philosopher Marshall McLuhan warned that “every extension is also an amputation.” Every tool that extends human capacity also erodes the skill it replaces. Fire became electricity; navigation became GPS; memory became data. Each innovation expands our reach, but dulls our presence.

This is the Drift of Embodiment—the slow externalization of our intelligence until we forget it was ever part of us. We have extended our senses into machines, our logic into algorithms, our communication into clouds. We’ve become mind-heavy and hand-light.

But drift isn’t decay; it’s movement.
And what drifts outward can return.

The same technology that distances us from our senses can also reconnect us. Tools like artificial intelligence—when used reflectively, not reactively—can reawaken the ancient intuition that knowledge isn’t something we possess, it’s something we participate in.

The hand remembers what the machine forgets.
Maybe that’s where wisdom begins again—not in the next upgrade, but in the next act of attention.