AI and Existential Surrender |
Cognitive surrender changes how we think.
Emotional surrender changes how we connect.
Existential surrender changes who we become.
Dante imagined the deepest circle of hell as frozen.
Most people remember the flames. They remember punishment and torment. What Dante placed at the very bottom was something different. The deepest circle was frozen, and all movement had stopped—its own literary version of absolute zero.
I’ve been thinking about that concept lately because it captures a possibility that rarely appears in discussions about artificial intelligence. We spend a great deal of time asking what AI will become. But another question might be what happens when the experiences that once shaped human beings become increasingly optional?
Recently, I’ve explored two ideas that share an interesting border. The first was cognitive surrender, the gradual transfer of human thinking to artificial intelligence. The second was emotional surrender, the temptation to replace difficult human engagement with AI interactions that ask less of us. As I worked through those ideas, I began to notice a larger pattern. The concerns weren’t confined to cognition or relationships. They appeared to touch three fundamental dimensions of human experience.
Cognitive surrender concerns how we think.
Emotional surrender concerns how we connect.
Existential surrender concerns who we become.
Together,........