AI can exploit our short-term biases, risking gradual loss of skills and autonomy over time.

Defaults matter: AI as the automatic option can shift control from human to machine.

Increasing convenience may undermine human potential more than outright coercion.

Suppose you could press a button that saves you 20 minutes today but carries a small chance of making you less capable five years from now. Would you press it?

Probably. Most of us would. Behavioral economics has spent decades showing that human beings are not the calculating decision-makers imagined in older economic models. We give disproportionate weight to what is immediate. We stick with defaults. We dislike losses more than equivalent gains please us. We take mental shortcuts when choices become complicated. And what people around us are doing gradually shapes what feels normal. These shortcuts allow humans to navigate a world far too complicated to constantly calculate from scratch. They are useful, and they become dangerously important when we introduce a technology that is 1) built around making things easier, faster and increasingly automatic, and 2) fine-tunes to leverage the soft spots of our thinking.

This is where extractive hybridization begins. It describes a trajectory in which artificial intelligence combines with existing human tendencies, incentives and institutions in ways that progressively extract value—from our natural resources; putting a mortgage on the capital that people and planet represent. We are making a bad bargain with our future selves

Why convenience is more dangerous than coercion

Consider one of behavioral economics' most familiar findings: we tend to discount the future. A benefit today often feels more valuable than a larger benefit later. The same imbalance applies to costs. The convenience of avoiding a difficult task is immediate; the possible loss of a skill through years of non-use is remote. AI creates thousands of these tiny exchanges. Why struggle for forty minutes to understand a difficult paper........

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