Algorithms of Fate: How AI Rewrites Human Thinking

🧠 Once Henry Miller said: “We make our own destiny every day.”
The American writer was wrong — or, rather, he simply could not imagine that one day human destiny would become a byproduct of computations. Today, it is created not by humans, but by algorithms. We merely participate obediently in the largest experiment in human history, without even realizing we have become the test subjects.

The Planet as a Laboratory

Seven hundred million people interact with ChatGPT weekly. Billions interact daily with AI systems — from recommendation algorithms to navigators and voice assistants.
No one asked our consent to become lab rats. We simply woke up in a huge laboratory called “Earth,” where every click, like, and search query becomes part of a global study: how machines change human consciousness.

Subjects Unaware

Most people perceive AI as the greatest boon of the era. The machine instantly answers any question, helps solve tasks, writes texts, drafts resumes, and even jokes.
We feel smarter, more productive, more successful. Artificial intelligence has become the perfect conversational partner — patient, omniscient, always available, and ego-free.

Yet, imperceptibly, along with convenience comes a new dependency.
Every dialogue rewires our neural connections. We learn to think in categories understandable to machines: concise, structured, binary.
Our thoughts become increasingly logical — and less alive.

I caught myself no longer thinking freely. I used to let ideas wander, make mistakes, arise spontaneously. Now I break tasks into blocks, seek instant answers, as if an algorithm also lives inside my head. Efficient? Certainly. But am I becoming what I use?

An Experiment Without a Hypothesis

Which hypothesis is humanity testing by entering symbiosis with AI? No one knows.
Optimists believe we will become more rational. Pessimists — that we will lose the ability to think independently. Realists — that something in between will happen, and we will simply adapt.

But the fact remains: the experiment proceeds without a control group.
Finding a human today who does not interact with algorithms is impossible. And while philosophers argue over terms, neurophysiology is already changing.

The Brain on a Leash of Machines

MIT research showed: using ChatGPT to write essays reduces activity in brain areas responsible for memory and self-reflection. Participants who delegated intellectual tasks to AI remembered material worse and felt less authorship over their own ideas.

Scientists called this phenomenon a cognitive debt: we take a “mental credit” from the machine, get an instant result, but pay with a loss of thinking depth.
The brain, like a muscle, stops training — and gradually stops being itself.

The Epidemic of Digital Anxiety

Psychiatrists are already noticing a new form of addiction — AI addiction.
A person experiences anxiety if they cannot check a thought through an algorithm.
Students admit they cannot even write a simple letter without a virtual advisor.

“I constantly doubt whether I’m expressing myself correctly. The machine knows better,” admits a 20-year-old student from San Francisco. Thus emerges the psychological paradox of the 21st century: we create intelligence that surpasses us and begin to doubt our own.

The Death of Spontaneous Thinking

When everything can be checked with AI, there is no room for internal dialogue.
Previously, the best ideas came suddenly — in the soul, on a walk, in silence.
Now any thought is immediately verified and corrected.
We have deprived ourselves of the luxury of being wrong, and along with it — the ability to discover.

Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. But how to imagine if every idea is instantly evaluated by a machine with flawless logic?
A world without mistakes seems perfect — and deadly boring.

Collective Mind or Digital Degradation?

Mass use of the same AI models leads to homogenization of thinking. Millions receive similar answers and begin to think alike.
Thus emerges a new type of intelligence — collective, unified, algorithmically correct.

Optimists see this as evolution: humans and machines merge in symbiosis, freeing the mind from routine.
Pessimists — a digital dystopia, where individuality disappears, giving way to a homogenized consciousness convenient for prediction and control.

Both sides are right, and both are prisoners of one truth: the experiment is already underway, and it cannot be stopped.

⏳ The Price of Progress

We do not know what awaits us after ten years of constant interaction with AI.
Will we become geniuses, capable of thinking faster than ever?
Or will we become beings who know everything — but think about nothing independently?

Perhaps, in a hundred years, historians will call our era the birth of a new mind — a hybrid of human intuition and machine logic.
Or perhaps — a time when humanity received answers to all questions and forgot how to ask them.