My husband might drive us in circles, but I could always get us turned around, even through Northern New Jersey’s tangle of roads, where every exit seems designed by someone holding a grudge. I was our navigator, good with directions. On a date night in New York City, I could figure out which subway lines would get us from Midtown to the Upper East Side before my husband had finished saying, “Should we just call an Uber?”
Whether drafting a laser-sharp email, cooking the perfect roast chicken, or painting a bookcase, I had built a knowledge base through chatting with friends, reading books and magazines, and simple trial and error. I arrived in midlife with skills and discernment, sure of what I knew, and good at getting the right kind of information when I wasn’t.
When the internet, and later, smartphones arrived, I saw tech as a welcome addition—progress that made life easier and saved time. I appreciated buying groceries from my couch or shopping for a new pair of pants without trekking to the mall.
But with the infiltration of AI, something shifted. Instead of offloading jobs that were time consuming or stressful, I started handing over the tiny decisions—the kind I had made for decades without a committee, a chatbot, or a blinking cursor asking how it could help. Seemingly overnight, I no longer had the patience to flick on a light switch or use the remote to turn on the TV. It was easier to open my mouth and shout orders at Alexa.
Before long, tech became my default for virtually every decision.
A drive to a favorite lunch spot was now narrated by Siri’s interruptions because I no longer felt confident of how to get there. I started asking ChatGPT how to style my hair, whether a text sounded too eager, and how to reach out to former colleagues—all things I’d done for decades without tech intervention. It was only after I’d spent an hour chatting with the bot, looking for its chirpy stamp of approval on new throw pillows for the living room sofa, that I took a breath.
I know how to buy a throw pillow, I thought. Why am I asking you?
Watching My Agency Evaporate
I grew up in the 1960s, when women were considered incapable. By the time I entered the workforce in the late 1970s, Second Wave feminists had laid siege to these stereotypes and forced a seismic change in the political and cultural dynamics that denied women full agency. Sexism was still rampant, but dramatic societal change meant we could build our own lives.
Achieving more than my elders was a source of satisfaction for me, and them, and even the most humbling of mistakes—from a bad choice of boyfriends to a work blunder—were mine to fix. My bad decisions made me smarter, sharper, and more attuned to what I was good at and what needed work, even as I was building competence and self-awareness. (Related: I Trained the AI That’s Coming for My Job. Then I Became It.)
But now, with AI and algorithms, I could feel myself getting dumber by the day, allowing an eerily insistent chatbot to tell me what to buy, how to dress, even how to organize my days after leaving full-time work. That morning, while pillow shopping, I could sense my skills and confidence waning.
And it wasn’t all in my head.
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They’re Stealing Our Brains
Research suggests that overreliance on tech can chip away at our critical thinking skills, our self-mastery, and the resilience that comes from overcoming challenges. Keep asking tech for answers on how to plan and orchestrate your life, and you’ll end up with one designed and directed by AI and algorithms. When you’re no longer able to cultivate and trust your own interests and preferences, you’ve essentially relinquished your personal identity. You no longer have a mind of your own.
Experts openly admit that tech is purposely designed to diminish human agency, keeping us tethered and reliant. But tech barons figure we’re so addicted to convenience that we’ll gladly go along with this power grab. So far, we’re proving them right.
About half of women use a voice assistant daily and social media and music gatekeepers like Spotify are more popular with women than men. One-third of women have adopted AI, and usage is expected to soon surpass that of men. Tech is now our constant companion, telling us how to manage our health, our households, our kids’ schedules, and what to do when we break under the stress.
But, despite all the chatter about convenience, offloading is simply a replacement for the 60s-era husband who dictated the terms of women’s lives. Every aspect—from the clothes they wore to the meals they cooked to their likes and dislikes—was his to determine and direct. The suffocating cultural message was simple: Men know best. Women did as they were told.
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The Question We Need To Ask
We have to ask ourselves: Are we ready to squander the richness of our complicated, brilliant, and messy lives, and the intuition and critical thinking that helped build them, to a system that is engineered to diminish those skills? Are we okay with returning to a life of dependency and self-doubt, seeking tech’s imprimatur on every aspect of our lives?
There’s nothing wrong with convenience, and women—especially those with young children and caregiving responsibilites—need support. We’ve tried to equalize household labor, but it never happened. That said, can we agree that a wholesale handover of agency is too big a price to pay for “frictionless” ease?
That morning on the sofa with the bot, I knew I was squandering something precious, singular, and hard won. And in that moment, I asked the question we all need to ask, every time we default to tech: Do I need to ask this question or do I already know the answer?
With that simple question, you can put the brakes on the non-stop ceding of your brain to a system focused on monetizing your dependency. In those brief moments, you can reclaim something that isn’t for sale—the authority to steer and design your own life on your own terms.
Related:
- The Fastest-Growing Entrepreneurs in the World? Women Over 50.
- AI in Therapy: Concerning or Comforting?
- Unretirement: When Your Money Retires Before You Do
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This article originally appeared on PROVOKED and was syndicated by MediaFeed.co.
