Okay, I’ve been working with and writing about artificial intelligence for years, and I’ll say this at the start. AI may be the single greatest leap in human capability since fire. We’ve built a system that can navigate language, pattern, and symbol with a speed and fluency that still catches me off guard. It’s dazzling and humbling. And don’t forget, it’s ours.
We’ve all heard the darker predictions that AI will surpass us and maybe even rule us. Those fears aren’t fantasy and they’re worth taking seriously. But the greater and more immediate danger, in my view, isn’t a machine deciding to take control. It’s us, willingly handing over parts of our thinking long before that moment ever comes.
We often comfort ourselves with the idea that the brain isn’t a computer. We point to its messy biology, its self-rewriting adaptability, its tolerance (perhaps dependence) for noise and error. The brain runs on the chemistry of a living body, shaped by evolution and tangled in purpose. And that’s nothing like the tidy logic of a machine.
That’s true. And it’s important. But it’s not the safety net we think it is. The real risk isn’t that AI will start thinking like us. It’s that we’ll start thinking like it.
What I mean by anti-intelligence
I use the term anti-intelligence to describe the way AI “thinks.” And it’s not as an insult, but as a neutral description. It’s not good or bad. It’s just different. And in a world of anthropomorphizing, that’s important.
Let’s unpack this a bit. Human intelligence drifts, revisits, rewires, and adapts. In other words, we make meaning from a sort of fluid ambiguity that grows through friction. AI operates in a different perspective. One that arranges patterns for coherence, aiming for completion, and not transformation.
That’s fine. In fact, it’s part of what makes AI so useful. The danger is what happens when we stop treating those differences as boundaries and start letting its style of “thinking” contour our own.
The complacent mind
I worry less about AI “taking over” and more about us giving up. Not intentionally, but gradually, almost without noticing.
It starts small. We lean on AI to phrase something better, to recall a fact we’ve half-forgotten, to summarize an idea so we can move faster. That’s all fine in isolation. But slowly, our tolerance for ambiguity, our patience with messy problems, and our habit of pushing past the first neat answer start to decay into whatever AI tells us it should be. Simply put, we begin to favor fluency (statistical coherence) over depth. And when that happens, we start mistaking arrangement for understanding to the polish of statistical order.
And here’s the part that feels dystopian to me: not the machine’s output, but the human mind that decides that’s enough.
This isn’t an anti-AI story
AI’s not the villain here. In fact, it’s a triumph and one of the most astonishing artifacts of human ingenuity. But like all powerful tools, it shapes us in return.
The dystopia worth worrying about today isn’t in the machine. It’s in us, when we grow so accustomed to machine-like thinking that we stop noticing what’s missing and that’s the wandering, the stubborn originality, the deeply personal way humans make meaning.
That’s the “monster” we have to watch for. It’s not just an algorithm with malice, but a person who’s forgotten how to think beyond one.
Holding the human line
I’m not suggesting we retreat from AI. I’m suggesting WE stay awake inside it. Ask questions that don’t fit into its neat patterns constructed with complacency. Let’s sit with answers that feel incomplete and treat techno-coherence as the start of a conversation, not the end of one. And above all, remember that our greatest advantage isn’t speed or recall, it’s the ability to think in ways that no machine, however brilliant, can quite capture.
Because the end of intelligence won’t come with a bang or a server farm gone rogue. It will come quietly, when the shape of our own minds starts to look a little too much like theirs.
