Intellectual humility sharpens judgment and counteracts the bias ego brings.

AI tools can inflate self-perception, especially among those who feel tech-savvy.

Tools are aids, not substitutes, for authentic self-development.

A reporter cornered Marie Curie in 1904 and asked whether radium might cure disease. She refused to guess. Nothing had been demonstrated, she said, and she would not pretend otherwise. Her caution vanished the moment marketers got hold of her discovery. Drugstores sold radium water by crate. Chocolate came laced with it. A Pittsburgh steel heir named Eben Byers drank roughly 1,400 bottles of a radium tonic called Radithor, convinced he had found a private engine of vitality. His jaw dissolved. His skull grew holes. The Wall Street Journal summed up the era in 10 words: "The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off."

Every Century Gets Its Glow

Byers believed he had acquired a superpower. So did the physicists who promised, mid-century, that atomic energy would soon be too cheap to bother metering. So did the scientists who announced in 2000 that they had sequenced the "book of life," a phrase so seductive that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair read it aloud together on television. Twenty years on, the metaphor needed far more footnotes than anyone expected, and the promised wave of personalized cures arrived as a trickle rather than a flood. Then came the internet, sold as a leveler of hierarchies and a connector of continents. Then smartphones, an oracle........

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