Pop culture has been showing us what the AI takeover will look like for years. Sarah Connor tried to warn us: the metal monsters will one day wake up, decide we’re the bad guys and start terminating.
That is not the apocalypse I am worried about. I do not expect the robots to rise up and take over the world. What I am seeing instead is their ability to take over our inner world.
A vice that looks like a virtue
Most dopamine machines come with a warning label. Gambling, gaming, sugar, drinking, drugs. No one mistakes them for healthy or valuable. Knowing that excess is dangerous gives us an internal meter. We limit our bets and count our drinks because we understand the consequences if we don’t.
AI is the first vice that makes you look good while it has its hooks in you. You can lose hours of your life to it and come out with a presentation, a process or a prototype that looks and feels like progress. Nobody stages an intervention for that. Instead, you are praised.
But with every upside AI provides, there is a trade-off. For me, it began truly costing something.
The other edge
The three most obvious benefits of AI turned out to be the same three things that have cost me the most.
It doesn’t need me to be precise. A few years ago it mattered how you wrote a prompt. Now it’s irrelevant. I can type run-on sentences full of typos and grammatical errors and it still gets the gist. Voice texting straight into it is even faster. But a few months ago I noticed how bad I had gotten at talking. Actually talking. To adult humans.
Its first draft feels like magic. The first version of anything feels like it read my mind, and I am amazed at how much it gets right. Then I look at the details and the uncanny valley kicks in. Something is just slightly off in the copy or the design. Maybe it’s pulling in some unrelated context and applying it where it doesn’t belong. It’s the Pareto principle with a twist: 80% of it may be right, but the 20% that is wrong can be catastrophic.
It saves me time by spending someone else’s. Something produced fast and handed to someone else as garbage costs more than however many minutes it saved me. It costs trust and reputation. When two people are only emailing their AI’s writing back and forth, facts may be getting exchanged (perhaps even flawlessly!) machine to machine. What gets lost is everything that normally passes between two people: nuance, personality and perspective.
What I keep for myself
I give the time back to deep work, not busy work. My moment of clarity: I had automated and sped up so much of my work, and then just filled the time with more busy work. It is easier than ever to do things that feel productive. But the whole benefit of all this leverage is the space it opens up for the deepest, most human work. The stuff that is truly irreplaceable. So while a fifteen-minute code run goes, I walk. I read a book by a human author. I write my to-do list by hand.
I wrestle an idea before I hand it over. Before an idea goes into Claude, I try to work it out analog first, even if only briefly. I talk it over with a person, draw it on a whiteboard or journal it. It sounds backwards when AI can figure out so much from a raw dump. But if dumping is all that gets done, the muscles that matter most atrophy. The thinking gets thinner, and what gets dumped in gets worse and worse.
I write my own words. I don’t use AI to write my emails, posts or essays. I still use it to organize ideas, catch details I’d miss, even build an outline. But the more people tire of reading AI content, the more it matters to me to create without it. Every piece written by a person keeps the world’s ratio a little more human.
Further in
Over the past month I’ve had many conversations with people whose work looks a lot like mine. We’ve all lived the same arc: the high, the hollow feeling, the moment we really noticed something was off. This shared fatigue isn’t driving us away from using AI - it’s driving us further into our humanity.