There’s a line I’ve always loved about parenting: having children is deciding to let your heart walk around outside your body. It is beautiful because it is terrifying.
Parenting externalises the heart. AI externalises something else.
For the first time, part of our brain can live outside the body — memory, drafting, synthesis, pattern recognition, idea generation. These now sit partly outside us.
When your heart lives outside your body, the lesson is attachment. Parenting is the great humiliation of love: discovering that what matters most to you will not obey your risk committee.
When your brain lives outside your body, the lesson is agency. AI can extend thought. It can also replace it. It can sharpen judgment, or quietly turn you into a smoother, faster, more average version of everyone else. The danger is not that AI becomes too intelligent. The danger is that we become too willing to stop thinking.
A high-agency person uses AI to clarify, compress, challenge and connect. A low-agency person uses it to avoid the work of thinking. One expands the mind. The other laminates it.
Both separations ask the same question: what remains inside you when part of you is out in the world? With children, the answer has to be values. With AI, the answer has to be judgment.
The trap is “later”. But later is where unlived lives go to become regret with better furniture.
Use AI to extend your mind, not replace it. Because the future will not belong to people who use AI the most. It will belong to people who know which parts of themselves must never be automated.
Further reading: The AI Mirage: Why Healthcare Can’t Run Before It Crawls · The Jarvis Principle: Reclaiming Your Attention from the AI Swamp · The Question Economy: Why Curiosity Is the New Intelligence
