IT’S easy to feel quite Luddite these days.

The machine, in all its modern horror, has stolen ineluctably into every part of our existence. For many, the algorithm now decides our life partner. A dating-app swipe increasingly leads to marriage and babies. The very essence of humanity – love, sex and the future of the human race – is now an iteration of technology.

So, wanting to pick up a hammer and smash hell out of a computer like the Luddites battering Spinning Jennies before Victoria was on the throne seems to make steadily more sense.

Technophobia isn’t my natural condition. I’m a Generation X cliché. We invented this world … but doesn’t my generation’s "brand", the stark futuristic trademark "X", also fittingly evoke today’s deadening, technological dystopia?

From the moment I got my tiny hands on an Atari in the 1970s, I’ve been, as that wearisome phrase puts it, an "early adopter" of all new technologies. My study looks like the laboratory of Doc Emmett Brown (the crazy scientist in Back to the Future), strewn with the wires and guts of long-dead gadgets and gizmos.

Back at the dawn of the internet, I was one of those mocking the 1990s Luddites doom-mongering that the internet superhighway was actually a path to ruin. "Och, they said the same about the printing press," we jeered. "The same about radio, TV. You can’t hold progress back."

The folly of that position needs no great rehearsal. Technology has strip-mined jobs, atomised society, and become a tool of political evil. Social media, we once believed during the Arab Spring, would destroy despots; it’s now the number one weapon in the despot’s arsenal. The internet has become the world’s largest crime scene, littered with victims of child exploitation, racial hatred, misogyny, stalking: you name it, all hell is here.

For some years now a rather chilling thought has played around in my head. As well as being an ad-man’s dream when it comes to new technology, I’m also rather a nerd for all things ancient and anthropological. To study the history of humanity from its early origins is to study how technology shaped the species. It’s less the ideas we invented which changed the world, and more the tools: fire, steel, gunpowder, nuclear fission, computers.

The horrible truth is, I fear, that humans have advanced at an incredible rate technologically over the last 250,000 years, but in terms of our emotional development we’re still in nappies. There’s really not much difference between cave paintings and Picassos.

Picasso, it’s claimed, acknowledged that truth himself when he emerged from viewing cave paintings in Lascaux, France, and said: “We’ve invented nothing.” Is there a vast difference between the ancient Athenian plays of Sophocles and the dramas on our screens? Has music fundamentally changed that much between the log drum and the synthesiser?

If art is an expression of the human soul – of our species’ emotional health – then maybe we’re not doing that great. We’re demi-gods of technology, but infants when it comes to our emotions. How are creatures which reached the Moon still killing each other over flags? Perhaps, if we’d developed evenly along both tracks – the emotional and technological – we’d be in better shape today.

Right now, we stand on the cusp on a technological leap which will shift us from demi-god to god, while potentially reducing us even further in terms of our emotional development: the dawn of the AI age. On Tuesday, a lifelike robot, called Ai-Da, with advanced artificial intelligence stood before a House of Lords committee discussing the impact a – creature? – like itself would have on the creative industries.

Ai-Da moved its head from side to side taking in the peers asking questions, in a moment for which the phrase "uncanny valley" was invented. The term means that sense of macabre unease caused by seeing something which looks human but that we know isn’t fully human.

Ai-Da paints, rather well. "It" made a case for the role of technology in art – even alluding to the solipsistic (at least for a robot) argument that the camera’s invention brought about a renaissance in the visual arts. Ai-Da also chillingly mentioned, as an aside, that inventions like "her" (?) “can be both a threat and an opportunity for artists”. Experience teaches us threat usually trumps opportunity when it comes to technology … if there’s money to be made. And there’s always money to be made.

It wasn’t that long ago that an AI said they’d “destroy humans” during an interview. Now, I don’t ascribe to the Terminator prophecy: that robots will rise up, blasting us into oblivion (though I await tomorrow proving me wrong, again). Some thinkers float a more likely future scenario: AIs, programmed with ruthless logical algorithms to make the world a better place, simply "realising" that eliminating some humans is the most utilitarian approach to their primary task. They love us to death.

However, AI Armageddon isn’t what troubles me. What troubles me is that AIs just steal, inch by inch, all that makes us human. If AIs become artists – directing films, writing books (they can already write poems, quite badly, but they can still write them), making paintings and music – then what do we do? It’s art that makes us human. Art is how we explain ourselves to ourselves. If another intelligence creates art for humans, then we’ll lose touch with what it means to be "us".

Will we become the human flesh-bags EM Forster envisioned in The Machine Stops: people dependent like babies on a vast artificial intelligence they no longer even understand?

Humanity cannot roll back time. Ask the ghost of Robert Oppenheimer, father of the A-bomb. But we could at least heed Oppenheimer – who said "I’m become Death, destroyer of worlds" – and realise that we’ve gone too far, too fast, and in evolutionary terms we’re unequipped to deal with our technological genius. With technology, we need to do a very human thing: stop, think, talk. A future technological dystopia may well already be upon us. Perhaps, the least we can do is discuss how to shield ourselves somewhat from our own deadly ambition.

Read more by Neil Mackay:

Be afraid – this is what happened when an AI machine spoke

Big Read: Why artificial intelligence will either be the saviour or exterminator of the human race