By Josh Stylman at Brownstone dot org.

I didn't want to feed my soul into a machine. That was my first instinct when AI tools started appearing everywhere - not concern about jobs or privacy, but something deeper. These tools promise to make us smarter while systematically making us more dependent. After decades of working in the internet industry, I'd already watched it transform into something more insidious than just a surveillance machine - a system designed to shape how we think, what we believe, and how we see ourselves.

AI felt like the culmination of that trajectory.

But resistance became futile when I realized we're already participating whether we know it or not. We're already interacting with AI when we call customer service, use Google Search, or rely on basic smartphone features. A few months ago I finally capitulated and started using these tools because I could see how quickly they were proliferating - becoming as unavoidable as the internet or smartphones.

Look, I'm not just an old man resistant to change. I understand that every generation faces technological shifts that reshape how we live. The printing press disrupted how knowledge spread. The telegraph collapsed barriers of distance. The automobile transformed how communities formed.

But the AI revolution feels different in both pace and scope. To understand how dramatically the rate of technological change has accelerated, consider this: anyone under 35 likely doesn't remember life before the internet transformed how we access information. Anyone under 20 has never known a world without smartphones. Now we're witnessing a third epoch with AI tools proliferating faster than either previous shift.

More fundamentally, AI represents something qualitatively different from previous technological disruptions - a convergence that touches labor, cognition, and potentially consciousness itself. Understanding how these domains interconnect is essential for preserving personal agency in an age of algorithmic mediation.

My primary fear about AI isn't just the dramatic scenario where it becomes hostile, but the subtler threat: that it will make us subordinate to systems in ways we don't recognize until it's too late, weakening the very capacities it promises to strengthen.

What we're witnessing isn't just technological advancement - it's what Ivan Illich called iatrogenic dependency in his seminal work, Medical Nemesis. Illich coined this term for medicine - institutions that promise to heal while creating new forms of illness - but the pattern applies perfectly to AI as well. That's exactly what I'd been sensing about these new tools - it promises to enhance our cognitive abilities while systematically weakening them.

It's not the hostile takeover science fiction warned us about. It's the quiet erosion of individual capacity disguised as help.

This iatrogenic pattern became clear through direct experience. Once I started playing around with AI myself, I began to notice how subtly it attempts to reshape thinking - not just providing answers, but gradually training users to reach for algorithmic assistance before attempting independent reasoning.

Jeffrey Tucker of Brownstone Institute observed something revealing in a brief but illuminating exchange with AI expert Joe Allen: AI emerged just as Covid lockdowns had shattered social connection and institutional trust, when people were most isolated and susceptible to technological substitutes for relationship. The technology arrived when there was "mass disorientation, demoralization" and loss of community.

We can already see these everyday effects taking hold across all our digital tools. Watch someone try to navigate an unfamiliar city without GPS, or notice how many students struggle to spell common words without spellcheck. We're already seeing the atrophy that comes from outsourcing mental processes we used to consider fundamental to thinking itself.

This generational shift means kids today face uncharted territory....