| səˈkwāSHəs |

adjective formal (of a person) lacking independence or originality of thought.

When I stumbled across this word… I didn’t know its meaning, but loved how it skated about in my mouth. An obscure word for a new age, perhaps, is what I thought when I learned its meaning: that it might be, perhaps, descriptive of the biggest danger arising from AI, namely that AI might, perhaps, tend to cause a person to think they’re thinking, when they’re really not. As people increasingly rely on AI for information, recommendations, and decision-making, we may lose our capacity for independent, original thinking… without even being aware that it is happening. We may think we are thinking for ourselves, but in reality, our thought processes could be overly influenced or even superseded by AI algorithms. Of course that argument might be made when it comes to using most social media, and of most of our interactions with the internet and in the cloud.

It brings to mind Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, particularly his framework distinguishing between automatic, intuitive “System 1” thinking versus the more effortful, self-aware “System 2” mode of thought. Excessive reliance on AI could inhibit our deliberate System 2 cognition in favor of simply accepting AI’s System 1 outputs and recommendations without true critical assessment. Not that our ability to think would vanish, simply that, for large swaths of the population, the ability to think critically would atrophy. Plenty of people would argue that it already has….