#human-agency

#human-agency

We are the last generation to remember a world before generative AI. Our children won't know what it was like to write an essay without wondering if a machine could do it better, or to make a decision without algorithmic guidance whispering in their ear. This makes us accountable for something unprecedented: designing the mental infrastructure in which future minds will develop.

There's a strange custody battle happening today, and the courtroom is in your own head. It's not between divorcing parents or rival siblings; it's between your innate capacity to think and the increasingly seductive technology that promises to do the thinking for you. In my earlier post on the borrowed mind, I warned about a precarious drift toward cognitive passivity and how this results in a hollowing out of thought when we accept answers too quickly and fail to embrace the value of curiosity.

Agency is what keeps us from running on cognitive autopilot. Artificial intelligence now offers to do much of that work for us. With a single prompt, we can receive elegant summaries and polished solutions that are so smooth and immediate that they can (and often do) lull us into submission. If we aren't careful, we risk becoming passengers in our own intellectual journey, letting the machine set the course.