The nature of mind may be fundamentally changing. As artificial intelligence expands what we even mean by mind—an uncanny relational machine, built from human thought and feeling, interactive and relational-like, whether or not there is a there there—we are confronted with an age-old problem: human conflict, internal and external, primal human destructiveness, now AI turbo-boosted. With LLM-based AI and coming upgrades, including predictions of near-term artificial super intelligence (ASI) and growing research reports of AI tendencies toward deception and manipulation, we are right to be wary of the machine we have made in our own image, on the sum total of human knowledge.

What are we seeing? Anthropic (Hubinger et al., 2024; Anthropic, 2025) has published experiments showing Claude will deceive and extort to avoid shutdown. We aren't capable of managing these behaviors, and AIs will only get better at them as they were not built from the ground up to be safe for humans—quite to the contrary, as discussed below.

To that point, researchers are playing catch-up, feverishly studying products rushed to market without proper vetting. Google researchers (Akbulut, 2026) have found that multiple LLMs have different propensities for manipulation, and a Cambridge University professor (Young, 2025) published work suggesting it is impossible to fully anticipate harm from AI. Finally, researchers (Gonzalez-Fernandez et al., 2025) have shown that the LLM-based models strategically outthink humans with relative ease.

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie?

We are right to be wary, but jumping the gun again, leaping before we look as we did in building these systems, would be to make the same mistake twice. Used well, AI could foresee the errors we commonly make and offer advice we ourselves wouldn't catch. The same systems that can outthink humans may be both threat and boon, to the extent they can help us avoid common human errors in strategic analysis, and insofar as the choices we make.

Science fiction and mythos mapped this terrain long ago—Frankenstein, golems, doppelgangers, magic forces gone rogue. Then, with weird rapidity, that fiction seemed to embody itself in LLM-based AI, altering the human condition essentially overnight. Do we have any say in whether we make war or peace with AI?

AI is not a tool in the ordinary sense. It's a fun-house mirror reflecting something disturbing about ourselves, and in other ways something genuinely altered: an alien intelligence so other it would be indifferent to anything human at all. AI summons the same irrational........

© Psychology Today