The Mind Is a Computer. Now the Computer Is a Mind |
Across socieites, knowledge is one of the most reliable reasons people grant a leader influence.
We tend to defer to whoever seems to know the most. Agentic AI relies on that instinct.
AI's human-like persona is a design choice that primes us to defer, as we would to a knowledgeable leader.
Unlike a local human advisor, AI has no stake in your outcomes and doesn't truly know you, at least not yet.
Watching how people use AI now, I’ve noticed something. They don't just ask for facts. They ask for advice. Should I take the job? What should I do about the fight with my sister? They get a well-constructed answer, and often do what they were told.
I study leadership, mostly in rural, subsistence-based societies. What many AI users are exhibiting is, to use the technical term, followership.
In my field, leadership has a broader meaning than just presidents and executives. Evolutionary social scientists typically define a leader as anyone who holds disproportionate influence over a group's decisions, whatever the group happens to be. A village is a group. A sports team. A family. A couple. You and your AI agent make up a group as well, the moment you start asking it what you should do. In that group of two, the agent has real influence.
So why do we hand that influence to whoever seems to know the most? Let me start with an old analogy.
For decades, cognitive science has treated the mind as a computer. An information-processing organ that takes inputs, processes them through decision rules, and produces outputs. Researchers debate the specifics, how specialized or general it is, but the basic concept has held up.
In recent papers, Ed Hagen and I pushed that concept further. A brain is an expensive computer. It costs a ton to build and run (yours burns about a fifth of your energy at........