First comes comfort. And with comfort comes disempowerment. Gradually. Voluntarily.
GPS has replaced the sense of direction. The calculator has replaced mental arithmetic. Google has replaced memory. And ChatGPT has replaced independent thinking. Every convenience costs a capability. This is not cultural pessimism. It is a sober observation.
Anyone who has driven with a sat-nav for ten years can no longer find their way home without one. Anyone who delegates every question to an AI unlearns how to follow their own thoughts through to a conclusion. We are outsourcing cognitive abilities, just as industry outsourced its production to Asia. It is cheaper. It is more convenient. And it creates dependence.
Cognitive outsourcing follows a pattern that spans decades:
| Decade | Technology | Outsourced Capability |
|---|---|---|
| 1970s | Calculator | Mental arithmetic |
| 1990s | Navigation systems | Spatial orientation |
| 2000s | Google / Wikipedia | Factual knowledge, memory |
| 2010s | Smartphones | Planning, time management, social contacts |
| 2020s | ChatGPT, Claude | Writing, analysing, reasoning |
| 2030s | AGI assistants | Decision-making, judgement |
Every stage was celebrated as progress. And every stage further narrowed the space in which humans still think for themselves.
The effects are measurable. A study by University College London showed that London taxi drivers who navigated for years without a sat-nav had a significantly larger hippocampus -- the brain region responsible for spatial orientation. In GPS users, this area measurably shrank. [1]
Nicholas Carr argued as early as 2010 in The Shallows that the internet is destroying our capacity for deep, concentrated reading. Not because the internet is evil, but because the brain adapts to superficial, fragmented information consumption. [2] What Carr described for Google applies to generative AI in amplified form: if the machine delivers not only the information but also the analysis, the summary and the conclusion, what is left for the human mind?
The irony is bitter. The very species that tamed fire, invented the wheel and formulated the theory of relativity is voluntarily surrendering its intellectual tools. Not under duress. Under applause. Every new app, every new assistant, every new automation is celebrated. And each time, the space in which humans still think for themselves shrinks.
It is as if one relieved a muscle of all work and then wondered why it atrophied.
The real danger of superintelligence is not the Terminator moment. It is collective Alzheimer's: a humanity that has stopped understanding the world around it, because AI thinks faster, deeper and more comprehensively than any human.
Large language models consist of hundreds of billions of parameters. No one -- no engineer, no researcher -- can explain why such a model gives a particular answer to a particular question. Researchers call this "emergent capabilities" -- abilities that suddenly appear at a certain model size without having been programmed. [3]
No one taught these models to draw logical conclusions or write poetry. They simply do it. Beyond a certain level of complexity, something emerges that looks like understanding. Whether it is understanding, no one knows.
We have built machines that we do not understand. And we continue building them, because they work.
George Orwell's 1984 describes a society of total surveillance through coercion. But Aldous Huxley's Brave New World of 1932 is the more precise prophecy. Huxley's dystopia works not through oppression but through gratification. People are not imprisoned. They are entertained. [4]
Orwell feared that books would be banned. Huxley feared that no one would want to read a book any more. Orwell feared the denial of truth. Huxley feared that truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Ninety years after its publication, Brave New World reads like a manual for what is to come.
Swiss direct democracy presupposes empowered citizens. Citizens who read ballot proposals, weigh arguments, form independent judgements. If these capacities erode -- not through censorship but through convenience -- direct democracy loses its foundation.
The question is not whether AI assistants are useful. The question is whether we preserve the ability to function without them. For a society that can no longer think without its machines is not free. It is dependent. And dependence is the opposite of democracy.
[2] Carr, Nicholas: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W. W. Norton, 2010.
[4] Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World. Chatto & Windus, 1932. Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker & Warburg, 1949.