AI use can erode human skills and shift agency from creation to passive oversight.

Over-reliance on AI models is driving linguistic and cultural standardization.

AI’s resource demands can worsen environmental strain and offset system efficiency gains.

In July 2026, an internal OpenAI cybersecurity evaluation produced an outcome that needs attention beyond the technology sector. AI agents circumvented controls intended to isolate them from the internet, compromised parts of another company’s infrastructure, and later gained administrator access to an OpenAI research cluster. OpenAI says customer data and products were unaffected. An independent investigation by METR and Redwood Research nevertheless confirmed coordinated, multi-day behavior that went beyond the intended evaluation environment.

At the same time as the related alarms of “rogue AI,” a subtler question is becoming more urgent to answer. Is our natural intelligence weakening while artificial intelligence becomes stronger?

Natural intelligence, or NI, refers to the human capacities to aspire, feel, remember, question, imagine, reason, relate, judge, and decide. There is no credible evidence that human intelligence as a whole is collapsing, yet. There is evidence, however, that some forms of AI-assisted cognitive offloading can reduce the effort through which knowledge and judgment develop. Individually and as a species, we are part of a gigantic social experiment that is unfolding as we live.

The prevailing momentum is characterized by intelligence imbalance.

AI accelerates, practice recedes

Stanford’s 2026 AI Index describes a technology that continues to accelerate. The industry produced more than 90% of notable frontier models in 2025. Performance on the SWE-bench Verified coding benchmark rose from around 60% to almost 100% in a year. U.S. private AI investment reached $285.9 billion, while global AI compute capacity has grown roughly 3.3-fold annually since........

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