Can we think for ourselves anymore?

And can we build technology that forces us to?

Instagram taught us to optimise for documentation. TikTok taught us to optimise for virality. AI is teaching us to optimise for machines. How can we stop formatting and start thinking?

It’s curious that most of us perceive our evolutionary history as the process of becoming more human, yet anticipate our evolutionary future as becoming less human.

Were we more or less human before the introduction of agriculture - when hunting and gathering became needlessly inefficient? Were we more or less human before the Industrial Revolution, when machines made handcraft semi-redundant? Were we more or less human before the Internet Age, when digital convenience made in-person contact optional?

At each of these moments, traits considered pivotal to our human experience were eventually phased out from our understanding of humanness.

Now we enter the AI age, when outsourcing reason makes thinking our own thoughts a choice. We panic about AI making us less authentic - but we’ve been allowing algorithms to think for us since the launch of Instagram. Perhaps, as in these previous monumental shifts, our humanity can evolve with integrity. But we’ve already been choosing to give it up for years.

The thought partner trap

This story started in 2010, but let’s begin at the end. Many of us, myself included, justify our AI use by describing that chatbot as a thought partner. I’m still pushing my brain through discomfort, I’m still responsible for the real, lived, non-regurgitated insights. AI is just a means to organise my pinballing thoughts, to make them legible to anyone not living inside my brain, to challenge me until I have something that feels defensible.

But I wonder - did I not used to do that by myself, on a walk in the woods with my notes app open? Is it possible that I’m dulling my insights by not challenging them to the limits by myself? They are after all, my insights, ultimately what gives me value as a founder, or a writer, or a thought partner to someone else. Am I making them defensible against the wrong arguments by letting AI determine what those are?

And this is all with what’s considered the most productive use of AI, a sparring partner, employed only for collaboration, never for completion.

Although I’m not outsourcing my most important thoughts, the real work - is it inevitable that one day I’ll start thinking them in a way that’s pre-packaged for the chatbot, optimising for the prompt rather than the problem?

I’ve caught myself thinking in meme format, pre-digested for Twitter - the current meta embedded deeply enough in my psyche that I order my iced pistachio latte wondering what “the iced pistachio latte we have at home” would look like.

I know I’m not alone. It’s natural that the language of our inner world starts to reflect the ways we spend most time outwardly communicating. AI takes this to a new level - it’s not some passive meta we’re engaging with - every time we correct our prompt to get the output we’re looking for, AI is actively training us how to think our thoughts. Where we now spend 5 minutes critically thinking, soon we might spend 4 of those minutes critically formatting. The thoughts are still ours, but become gradually less authentic.

Living to document

To get a real sense of how this might radically alter our day-to-day human experience, we can look at the past 15 years of social media.

Instagram launched in 2010, transitioning from a fun photo sharing app, to the window through which we observe the lives of friends, celebrities and anyone else deemed interesting enough. The window through which we are observed.

By the time Instagram Stories launched in Coachella summer of 2016, we had already optimised our lives for documentation. More than that, we had optimised our aspirations. We were willing participants in a lie about everyone’s beautiful life, often forgetting that it was in fact a lie. The number one dream job was to be an influencer - to be one of the flower-crowned, Reformation-clad Coachella girls, with their pristine white-walled lofts, house plants that somehow never died despite their endless five star travel, breathing the rarified air of fashion front rows, film premieres and beauty launches. And if that wasn’t to be, we did what we could to present a life less ordinary.

Today, we have enough self awareness to resent this, but we still do it. Today, it’s less about performance and more about obligation - I must keep doing this to remain relevant. If I’m not perceived I don’t exist.

Phone bans are becoming a norm at concerts and raves, and I wonder, will people’s music tastes change when they’re there for the experience and not the receipts? Optimising for documentation is so deeply entrenched, there is zero chance it hasn’t, to varying extent, affected everyone’s tastes. The same way you can pretend you’re immune to advertising but if you’re engaging with modern society in a way that’s enabled you to read this, I have disturbing news for you.

Master baiters

If living our lives to document it later isn’t enough, we now also optimise for virality. Rather than sharing the thought or the idea, we share the diluted, lowest common denominator version of it, shoehorned into this week’s micro trend and framed for maximum reaction.

Negative reaction tends to drive more views than positive reaction, and so our feeds get darker and more dystopian, seeding division and pushing us into safe little echo chambers, where optimising for the viral lowest common denominator is even more inane. Our thoughts become progressively limited as we shape our output for what we hope might “hit” with a set of progressively limited thinkers.

Optimising for nothing

What does all this have in common, other than looking damning for human intelligence? We still somehow believe it will make our lives better. We will almost invariably take the most convenient path to what we think self actualisation looks like - wanting to believe we’re one viral video away from becoming the person we’re told we want to be - because it’s a lot more comfortable than the slow, tedious and rejection filled grind that is the alternate route to success. Posting into the void takes far less resilience than taking real and specific steps towards what you want for your life, painfully failing, and trying again.

It’s therefore unsurprising that in the age of AI, would-be founders are the new would-be influencers. The cosy delusion that one TikTok might change your life is replaced by the belief that you’re only one vibe-coded website and one yes from an accelerator away from…becoming the person you’re told you want to be.

We’re arriving to the AI era at a huge disadvantage. We’ve already traded autonomy for convenience. Convenience of action and convenience of thought. We’ve compromised our ability to form our own beliefs and insights and taste. What even is our authentic self anymore? That self is who we desperately need to reclaim to hold on to our humanity, so human-AI collaboration is possible and so our pointlessness isn’t inevitable.

The infrastructure of authenticity

Our human condition has mostly wired us to choose the easy option over the best option, and the belief that we might achieve a goal one day over the practical steps of actually doing it. The people with the discipline to counter these instincts are currently a minority. A move away from technology is an unrealistic solution - we can’t pretend everyone is going to put away their phones, touch grass and be fine.

Modern technology isn’t just inevitable, we’re already decades into human-machine symbiosis. So whilst disconnecting certainly addresses all the issues discussed here, no amount of fear mongering makes it a viable strategy if we’re also to participate in society.

To reclaim our last, essential, piece of humanness - our consciousness - we must design technology and systems to reward the behaviours that separate us from the machines.

We need infrastructure where authenticity is profitable - not just in clout, but in actual equity and access. Systems where early authentic belief is rewarded before something goes viral, where you can’t fake your way into ownership because you need provable skin in the game. Time-locked commitments that reward patience over instant gratification, where the person who sits with an idea for months earns more than the person who writes the hit tweet. Economic mechanisms that make the convenient path cost you, and the meaningful path pay you.

We also need platforms with deliberate friction. Mandatory waiting periods before you can share, community commitments you must fulfil to earn reciprocal value, AI that asks “did you think about this yourself first?” and tests you on it before agreeing to collaborate.

To accelerate this, we need a top-down societal shift to make friction high-status. Take our Western ideal of the perfect body. However you feel about this, it’s a powerful enough driver to push many people into disciplined habits that are genuinely positive and healthy, these being a side effect of the visible aesthetic goal. High friction behaviour will be adopted by the masses if it’s in pursuit of visible status. If that status comes from choosing high-friction technologies, resisting convenience, countering algorithmic brainwashing, then we’re more likely to do the hard work - even if we’re just in it for the visible status symbol, the side effect is rediscovering our authentic selves.

We also need metacognitive infrastructure - tools that help you notice when you’re formatting instead of thinking. AI is built for pattern recognition - we can have dashboards showing time spent in shallow versus deep engagement, prompts that reveal your optimisation patterns, systems that flag when you’re on autopilot. AI can become the medium through which we strengthen our thinking process, rather than a replacement for it.

In the physical world, we need experiences designed to be undocumentable - protected spaces that enforce living in the moment, where we can fully connect with our own private taste vs our public personas.

Choose your own adventure (evolution edition)

We may be fixated on AI as the final boss for authenticity - but really we’ve been post-authentic since 2010. To protect our authentic selves, we need to reclaim the agency we’ve been unconsciously giving away for decades. To unpick the algorithmic conditioning, reconnect with our own values, challenge our thoughts all by ourselves before we think about roping in a chatbot. This is what we should be doing today, every day, in preparation for the revolution. Like every other time in history, we will adapt to new technology. The question is whether we’ll have the most powerful sense of self humanity has ever seen, or if self gets eradicated. Personally, I’m optimistic.

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