Think of the computer sitting on your desk in front of you. You fire it up, you launch your email software, you use its interface to create an email to your boss saying you’re at home sick. Well, you’re not at home sick, in fact, but sipping your bubble tea in a nearby cafe, busy catching up on your favourite tech blogs. Doesn’t matter. Yet think about the relationship you have with the machine at this moment. At every moment of sending that email you are perfectly aware who you are, and by looking at the computer interface you can tell whether the machine is receiving your cues when you type the text in. You can tell that you manifest your behaviour by clicking the “send” button on that email client, and that’s where your action ends, and machine action begins. In a way, there is a certain established pipeline of intention coming from your brain, to your physical movements that gets translated by the interface into the machine commands. These commands then convert into electrical signals, and so on, all the way to the electric signals generated by synapses in the brain of your boss. She’s inevitably getting upset to hear about you being sick and perhaps a little annoyed about the project deadline being missed today.