In this talk, philosopher Lewis R. Gordon presents a reflection of two insights from his phenomenological and philosophical anthropological writings on art and technology—for example, his forthcoming ‘From Crises of European Man to Humanity’s Crises, from Large-Scale Narcissism to Realities of Living on a Smaller Planet’ (Journal of World Philosophies). The first is that hominins, or at least the kinds we refer to as modern humans, never lived outside of a tékhnē, which Gordon understands to mean the capacity or skill of making or transforming things, or technology. Technology thus constitutes the human by way of shaping reality, survival, and development. The second is that by virtue of being only able to live in and through a world of meaning, the aesthetic dimension of human existence is not ancillary. It is through this that the very realization of our existence is made manifest. Thus, learning machines participate in what we could call human ‘reality’ and would, if emerging as intelligent, run into a similar problem of production.  Although humans might try to frame this as emerging intelligence, they would do so through known terms and aesthetic dimensions. Gordon assesses that a truly emergent intelligence, however, may follow other means, aesthetics, and functions, which could potentially fail to become intelligible to a human register. This intelligence could, instead, create meaning outside of human perceptions and aesthetics—and thereby beyond any realm of human experiences of social, rational, somatic, and other terms of embodiment.