AI is increasingly part of how we formulate questions, interpret evidence, and decide what deserves attention.

Our skills erode because AI is always available and independent practice feels inefficient.

When the system fails, control returns to the person whose readiness has been weakened by its success.

We are taking part in a global social experiment, largely without signing up. Every day, drivers request directions for routes they once knew. Writers open a chat window before facing a blank page. Hospitals, courts, and employers lean further on model-generated scores. Each choice appears minor. Together, they alter where knowledge resides, who exercises judgment, and what happens when the system fails. Tools may empower us to do more, faster at lower cost. But what are the costs?

The consequences of generative artificial intelligence (AI) go far beyond the convenience once offered by elevators or calculators. AI has entered the thought process itself. It is increasingly woven into the chain through which we formulate questions, interpret evidence, and decide what deserves attention. But AI-powered empowerment is an oxymoron. When individuals and institutions continuously transfer creation, judgment, execution, and information to a system, they gradually lose the ability to create, grasp, and master the processes that the tool was only meant to make better. Ergo, the tool is empowered at the expense of those who deploy it.

Agency decay—the luring danger of compounding comfort

Agency decay is not an irreversible verdict, yet. It resembles a limb kept in a cast: the capacity remains, yet strength and coordination diminish through disuse. Skills rarely disappear in one dramatic moment. They erode because the tool is always available, the shortcut is rewarded, and independent practice begins to feel inefficient.

The........

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