this is where technology began to matter to me.
i grew up in a pivotal moment in which computers promised almost infinite individual capability. with a computer, one person can write, create, program, publish, communicate, make money, learn almost anything, and reach someone on the other side of the planet. now ai pushes that promise to more extreme. maybe i dont have to know how to code. maybe i dont have to know the answer. maybe i dont have to remember. maybe i dont have to write. maybe eventually, i dont even have to decide.
there is something incredibly liberating about this. there is also something that scares me, because i have already lived this pattern once.
for years, i thought independence meant becoming capable enough to rely on fewer people. taken far enough, ai offers a similar fantasy: delegate more thinking, more remembering, more choosing, until life becomes perfectly optimized. but there is a strange endpoint to that logic. you become so capable of outsourcing your life that you are no longer really the one living it.
computers began as machines for increasing individual agency. the internet complicated that. more and more, our lives are mediated through systems designed around institutions rather than people. linkedin defines professional legibility. instagram turns identity into profiles and feeds. dating apps compress attraction into rankings and cards. messaging apps split relationships across corporate boundaries. recommendation systems decide what enters our attention.
ai goes one step further. it can start deciding how we interpret what enters it.
what should i say? what does this person mean? who should i trust? should i stay? should i leave? what should i want?
the dangerous version of ai completes the trajectory i spent my childhood trying to escape: a perfectly capable external system to which i delegate my judgment.
that is not ownership. it is just external consensus made personal.
i dont think the greatest promise of technology is that it can make better decisions for us. i think it is that it can help us make better decisions ourselves.
ai can expand the evidence available to me. it can remember what i forgot, surface patterns i missed, challenge my assumptions, show me contradictions, and help me understand another person more precisely. but whether something is actually right for me cannot be solved as a score. at some point i still have to act, expose myself to another person, accept uncertainty, and let reality answer back.
the machine should not become another parent. it should not become another society. it should not become another metric telling me whether my life makes sense.
technology should increase authorship, not replace it.
it should remember so i can notice more. surface patterns so i can judge them. help me understand another person so i can decide how to approach them. show me possibilities outside my existing model so i can collide with them. help me articulate what i actually want instead of optimizing me toward what seems desirable.
and maybe, through understanding ourselves better, technology can eventually help people find each other too. not because an algorithm has decided they are compatible, but because there is enough possibility between them that reality deserves the chance to decide.
i no longer think owning your life means controlling it.
you cannot control everything. you cannot know everything. you cannot become capable enough to need nobody. you cannot calculate your life before living it.
ownership is subtler than control.
it means remaining the author while still letting the world affect you.
that is the kind of independence i care about now. not isolation. not self-sufficiency. not accumulating enough intelligence, money, status, or technology that nothing can touch you. freedom is not protecting myself from being changed, but choosing what, and whom, i am willing to be changed by.
choosing what is worth depending on. what is worth becoming entangled with. what is worth wanting enough that it can hurt. and then taking responsibility for what comes out of it.
that is what i want technology to make easier.
not a machine that lives correctly on my behalf, but one that gives me more surface area with reality. more context, more memory, more perspective, more chances to understand myself and other people clearly enough to choose.
a collision does not leave either side untouched.
owning your life is not preventing the world from changing you. it is choosing what is worth colliding with, and staying the author of what happens next.