Artificial intelligence's deepest impact may be on the self, not society.

Repeated use of AI trains the mind to outsource thinking before it begins.

The real risk may not be machine dominance, but our human agency becoming optional.

Every transformative technology arrives with a promise. The internet promised newly found connectivity and a democratization of knowledge. And yes, it delivered those things, and then it delivered something else entirely. Attention became fractured, and identity became performative. The internet didn't just change what we could do. It changed the social conditions in which we lived. And perhaps most notably, many of these changes came in the form of unintended consequences.

Artificial intelligence (AI) may follow a similar path, but at a different depth. The internet reshaped society. AI may reshape the self.

History gives us a key lesson. Technologies rarely stay confined to their initial purpose. They enter human systems with one set of intentions and unfold through a tangle of habits and adaptations that nobody fully controls. The real story often begins after adoption, when side effects become inculcated into ordinary life.

With the internet, those effects played out in public. We saw them everywhere—from politics to our personal lives. But AI is........

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