here's what I think is happening. there's a paper that I first heard about from Mike Kuniavsky... it's called Folk Biology and the Anthropology of Science: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Particulars.
Apparently we - humans - see everything else in the world in one of four categories. Nonliving things, like rocks. Plants, which don't move but do have behaviour. Animals, which are clever. Humans, which are clever enough to lie to us.
Maybe technology has just crossed a complexity threshold and moved from plants to animals, and so we need new language and new metaphors to understand it.
Matt Webb, Web Directions South 2014 (Sydney, Australia), October 2014