Defying Obsolescence: Human Agency and AI
The devastation seems to intensify with each succeeding week. From the streets of U.S. cities to the leadership of other countries, people are rushing to put out the fires started by this president and the other arsonists responsible for Project 2025. The decision about what to focus on for each week's post is tough; there are so many significant events demanding attention.
It may seem odd right now, while ICE runs roughshod over the people of Minneapolis and they fight for their neighbors, to return to my ongoing consideration of AI. What finds its way to these pages does so through a process I'm only partly in conscious charge of. My head and heart feel pulled toward ideas and events that are speaking to me because of my own past, my personal experiences and throughlines. Next, my head and heart are then pushed to share what I'm learning and—to the best of my ability—whatever sense I'm able to make of it. Sometimes that means I'm writing about something other than what's most immediately important in the news cycle, which can feel a bit disjointed.
But below the surface, these things are all connected, much like the vast mycelial network that connects plant life underground. We are discovering that mycelial networks shuttle nutrients through systems in mostly mutually beneficial ways. However, certain segments of our digital networks seem more exploitative than reciprocal in nature. In the future, I hope to be able to write in more depth about the ways AI is part of the surveillance and police state we are living in, and the ways the technology contributes to inequity and injustice. For now, I still have so much more to learn about that history. These are some of the books on my shelf right now:
Interestingly, there were no AI-related materials on my original Learn, Imagine, Act list. While I have long been interested in the impact of digital technologies, especially on children and in education settings, I will confess that I had been avoiding digging into the subject.
However, I'm realizing that even though I'm no longer in the classroom, I can't hide from this complex and multi-faceted issue anymore. It's everywhere. And I have a responsibility to know as much as I can about it.
I walked past this utility pole in my neighborhood while I was composing parts of this newsletter in my head. I'm absolutely not going to tell you to "stop using AI." But I am inclined to think that this juxtaposition of graffiti does capture something about the dangerous connections between exploitive tech networks and authoritarianism. As I said, I'm not quite ready to write about that yet.
Instead, today I want to share links to three articles that are helping me think about two different societal aspects of AI—practical and philosophical—both of which have urgent implications for regulations and ethical policies. The first involves how the current business model tends to work and how that directly impacts users. The second raises important questions about the nature of intelligence and consciousness.
The article from The Hill Times below references recent statements from the Eurasia Group, asserting that
“Under pressure to generate revenue and unconstrained by guardrails, a number of leading AI companies will adopt business models in 2026 that threaten social and political stability—following social media’s destructive playbook, only faster and at greater scale,” reads the company’s analysis.
'We’ve seen this movie before. Cory Doctorow calls it ‘enshittification’: platforms attract users with attractive ‘free’ products, lock them in, then systematically degrade the experience to extract maximum value,' the report reads."
I think we are already seeing the threat to social and political stability playing out. Here are just a few instances I've seen called out on social media in the past week or so:
The Eurasia group warns that like social media,
"AI is following the same trajectory—only faster, and with a technology far more strategically important to the global economy than social media ever was. And AI isn’t just another platform. Social media captures your attention. AI programs your behaviour, shapes your thoughts, and mediates your reality.”
The "this isn't just another platform" part is key to recognize. The impact on younger generations is immense:
"The Eurasia Group report cites a 2025 study from the Centre for Democracy and Technology, which suggests nearly half of U.S. high school students use AI for mental-health support, while nearly one-fifth of teens claims to have a romantic relationship with an AI software."
The ramifications of this are disturbing, to say the least. See this recent Guardian piece for an example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/11/lamar-wants-to-have-children-with-his-girlfriend-the-problem-shes-entirely-ai
News
The second article highlights the impact of AI business models on knowledge creation and information sharing. Adam Kucharski is a professor who works on "mathematical and statistical models to understand disease outbreaks, and the effects of social behavior and immunity on transmission and control"(kucharski.io). This is extremely important research for human health and survival, which can be aided in various ways by AI. While the average person may be more familiar with the objections raised by artists and writers about the uncompensated use of their labor, Kucharski brings up the issue of software engineers.
He explains the importance of open source software to the scientific knowledge base, even while AI is functioning to endanger the ability of those sources to continue to survive. In many cases, AI is basing its output on those sources, while siphoning away the people whose support helps fund their very operation. It's hard to know which metaphor describes it better, that of the vampire or the snake eating its own tail. Kucharski uses the metaphor of the pipeline:
"Today’s models work most effectively when they can source inspiration from human-designed architectures, examples, and explanations. Once that pipeline dries up, AI will be stuck rehashing the same old content."
"He's being asked to build the infrastructure for his own obsolescence," Marc J. Schmidt says of Tailwind Labs CEO, Adam Wathan, who recently had to lay off 75% of his company's software engineers. Other companies and engineers are also making the decision to stop offering open source in order to protect their work and livelihoods.
Adam Kucharski
"Electromagnetic fields, the flux of neurotransmitters, and much else besides — all lie beyond the bounds of the algorithmic, and any one of them may turn out to play a critical role in consciousness," Anil Seth
This final article is a fascinating, thought-provoking read. It is at times challenging for the layperson. I ended up reading it in two sittings. Because it does so much to lay out an overview of existing theories and unpack their strengths, weaknesses, and implications, I think it is well-worth the effort.
Anil Seth is a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience who has researched and written extensively on the question of consciousness. In this essay, he walks us through how our tendencies toward anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism, and anthropomorphism can distort our perceptions of AI. He discusses how current language and metaphors are problematic, and describes the limitations of comparisons between silicon-based models and actual brains. He calmly and rationally lays out what the human, moral, and ethical stakes are in how we conceive of consciousness relative to our technological devices:
"How we think about the prospects for conscious AI matters. It matters for the AI systems themselves, since — if they are conscious, whether now or in the future — with consciousness comes moral status, the potential for suffering and, perhaps, rights.
It matters for us too. What we collectively think about consciousness in AI already carries enormous importance, regardless of the reality. If we feel that our AI companions really feel things, our psychological vulnerabilities can be exploited, our ethical priorities distorted, and our minds brutalized — treating conscious-seeming machines as if they lack feelings is a psychologically unhealthy place to be. And if we do endow our AI creations with rights, we may not be able to turn them off, even if they act against our interests.
Perhaps most of all, the way we think about conscious AI matters for how we understand our own human nature and the nature of the conscious experiences that make our lives worth living. If we confuse ourselves too readily with our machine creations, we not only overestimate them, we also underestimate ourselves."
As I followed Seth's careful parsing of the various schools of thought within tech circles, brain and consciousness science, and philosophy, two quotes from Werner Heisenberg's 1958 Physics and Philosophy Lectures came to mind. I've kept these pinned to my bulletin board for so many years, the paper has yellowed:
"The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite."
"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
I would argue that all these decades later, this is still where humans stand in relation to reality. So, here's the current sense I'm making of all this: we can recognize both the marvelous discoveries and the tremendous shortfalls in our scientific knowledge. Then we can demand that we proceed with clear-eyed caution and the intention to serve the interests of all (including the more-than-human community), not just those with the greatest profit motive.
Anil Seth
Like Shannon Vallor in AI Mirrors, Seth urges us not to be passive. A critical mass of us must stop avoiding or hiding from the subject and claim our agency.
The time to understand and act for safer, more beneficial, and sustainable applications of this technology is now.
