I think you touched on what feels like an anti-human zeitgeist. People tend to praise the capabilities of machines and animals while disparaging humans. We worry that machines will overtake humans. We protect the eagles, owls, and bears. Meanwhile, humans put too much carbon into the air and must be stopped.

It used to be that people attributed motives to rocks, plants, and animals to explain their behaviors, probably because that's our experience as humans. Then we thought "no, rocks, plants, and animals are more like automata that behave and we humans have higher things such as reason, action, language, exchange, arts, property, cooperation, and capital, or in a word we have 'civilization.'" Now it seems we think "rocks, plants, and animals have consciousness and humans are one among many animals. We only think humans have motives and wills distinct from the others but it's an illusion. Humans are like a virus and must be stopped."