If a machine can think for you, should it?
It may sound abstract, but in reality, you make this decision every day. Every Instagram post you swipe by is decided by a computer algorithm, every email you write finishes your sentences before you do, and every Google search summarizes what it thinks you should know.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated almost every dimension of our human lives, from how we connect with others to how we understand ourselves. Silicon Valley “tech giants” have captivated students everywhere with radical efficiency and elegant answers that let us put our lives on autopilot.
We must ask, is endless automation truly good?
When trying to answer this question, we are often caught between two extremes. On one side are the AI accelerationists of San Francisco, who extol unstoppable progress and believe industrial gains are the sole ends of human life. On the other side is a class of pessimistic D.C. politicians who barely understand the technology they rush to regulate.
Both perspectives miss something essential. Neither explains what role human thinking has in the agentic world, and both fear it will be replaced. I believe in a different direction: Human thinking and AI are synergistic. The two work together to strengthen something that is far more at risk: our curiosity.
Historically, we must appreciate how automation has never been about erasing human thought but rather redefining it. The first modern calculator did not extinguish our intellectual capacity—scientists did not go obsolete. Rather, automation of basic math expanded our ability to think deeper by mechanizing lower-order tasks so scientists could focus on higher-level questions.
These breakthroughs allowed us to understand the geometry of human biology and send the first humans to the Moon. Through automation, we could finally turn our attention toward the previously unsolvable—we could begin to crystallize the unknown. Our archaic questions, once solved, naturally gave way to more complex questions.
In a sense, automation rarely creates anything new. It simply completes what is familiar while freeing us to capture what we do not understand.
AI now prompts a similar decision. Just as generations of innovation and revolution have tested our ability to maintain our creative friction, we are once again called to think. If we ask the same tired questions, we will simply become a nation of spectators passively watching our own intellect.
If we allow AI to automate what is known while enabling us to grow the horizon of our inquiry, we can once again redeem the freedom that comes with comprehending the unknowns of our universe.
AI is not new. Its scale is simply beyond anything we’ve seen before. But its principle calls for a cultural renaissance. One where we take up the call to stay curious, ask deeper questions, and challenge the stronger ideas that follow. Human thinking is not a glass ceiling to shatter but an infinite ceiling worth raising—AI will help us push it further.
This is no easy task. AI has widened the scope of automation, bringing with it a host of new issues. To think on your own in an era of ChatGPT and Instagram has proven difficult. A functioning democracy depends on citizens who think critically, question authority, and judge with independence.
As the convenient life becomes inseparable from our modern lives, we continue to outsource our thoughts without any direction. What does a democracy do when it no longer thinks for itself? Do we devolve into neighbors of different political tribes pinned against each other, do our youth become an army for whatever ideologies the winds of TikTok push out, or do we become vessels for an endless appetite of corporate greed?
Perhaps then, the most dangerous world is not one where we think about any particular ideology, but one where we are lost for how to think at all.
Rising challenges to our critical thinking threaten our identity and preservation as a country. Since its founding, America’s strength has come from its ability to harness knowledge and labor to understand the world better. We have united for centuries around “hard work,” from the Detroit automobile plants that powered the industrial revolution to the steel beams that raised the Empire State Building.
Labels like race, religion, and geography have never been vast enough to encapsulate our whole nation. We are sewn together by something much stronger: a shared industriousness to do great things.
This is precisely why AI now feels like an assault on everything. If our national character has been defined by the work we do and the problems we struggle to solve, what happens when AI takes away the struggle and does the work for us? What remains to be done? Should we celebrate the end of our creative friction and our new lives of ultimate convenience?
The real danger is not automation, but rather the risk that we might become incurious. It is in our shared national chemistry to be driven by problem-solving, the discipline of thinking through hard questions, and the dynamic pride that comes with understanding the world through our own effort.
But automation presents a challenge—it tempts us to abandon the very processes that give those answers meaning and compel satisfaction with what is known.
A society that loses its hunger for understanding will not collapse at once but will slowly lose its unity and identity. When answers to our every thought can be generated instantly, the survival of our liberty is not defined by new land conquered in faraway wars but by the survival of human thought.
This agentic era demands we protect what is fragile: our willingness to keep asking questions.
