Note to the reader: English is not my first language. What follows is a genuine attempt to articulate my concerns and intuitions about AI, the human mind, and the fragility of our future. But I assure this post reflects my own thinking, edited carefully for clarity and structure. For transparency, I have shared my original draft and transcribed notes in a comment below.
Even if everything goes right with AI, the future could still be strange
When we talk about AI risk, we often divide the future into two categories: things go wrong, or things go right.
But I want to explore a different possibility.
Even if everything goes right with AI, the future could still be deeply strange—and potentially bad for us in ways we are not prepared to recognize.
Not because AI turns against us. Not because of war, unemployment, or geopolitics. But because AI intervenes in the one domain we understand least and depend on most: the human mind.
As we are all ware, AI’s core capability is not strength, speed, or energy. It is cognition.
It works directly on language, ideas, imagination, information, reasoning, and creativity. In short, it operates on the same substrates that our own minds use to understand the world and ourselves. It intervenes directly in the processes by which we think.
And this is where I believe the deepest danger lies.
We do not understand the mind we are trying to automate
We often speak casually about intelligence, consciousness, agency, and identity. But if we are honest, we do not know what any of these things really are.
We do not know what consciousness is, whether free will exists, how identity emerges, or where agency comes from.
We know that the brain exists. We know neurons fire. We know cognition correlates with physical processes. But the nature of mind itself remains largely mysterious.
And yet, this is the very domain in which we are now building powerful systems.
This matters because the mind is not like other engineered systems. A car has a purpose: it moves. A washing machine washes. A computer calculates. These systems are deterministic in limited ways. Their behavior is bounded by their design.
The mind is not.
Imagination has no clear limit. Thought has no fixed endpoint. Desire generates new desires. Meaning can be reinterpreted endlessly.
The mind is not just complex. It is open-ended.
And AI is the first technology that operates directly in this open-ended space.
Intelligence is powerful because it is vulnerable
We often celebrate intelligence as humanity’s greatest strength. And in many ways, it is. Our intelligence allowed us to invent tools, develop language, build societies, create science, understand evolution, and cure diseases.
But intelligence has another property that we rarely emphasize: fragility.
Because intelligence depends on representations, beliefs, narratives, identities, and models of reality, it is sensitive to how those representations are shaped.
Our entire civilization rests on fragile mental constructs such as money, institutions, laws, identities, values, and meaning. These things feel stable because they are widely shared. But they are not physically grounded. They exist because minds agree to sustain them.
Even at the individual level, a small shift in beliefs or self-conception can destabilize a life. ( I did that experiment on myself last year! I can share about it if anyone interested to learn more.)
This is why psychology matters. And this is why AI’s influence on cognition may be more consequential than its influence on labor or warfare.
We are planning for a structured future in an unstructured universe
Many AI safety discussions imagine futures that are still structured extensions of the present. We talk about economic disruption, political instability, labor markets, inequality, abundance, governance, and trajectories toward superintelligence.
Even our most extreme scenarios often assume continuity. Humans still exist (or don’t). Societies still function. Identity still matters. Agency still operates.
The timeline may accelerate and the scale may grow, but the basic narrative remains familiar.
I am not sure this assumption is safe.
The universe itself is not structured in ways we fully understand. We do not know how consciousness arises, how identity persists, whether intelligence has natural boundaries, or what kinds of minds are possible.
Evolution produced us through a long chain of accidents. There is no guarantee that the next phase of cognitive evolution will preserve anything we recognize as human flourishing.
The future could be not just faster or richer, but qualitatively alien.
And in such a future, the central question may not be whether we are wealthy, healthy, or employed. The question may be whether beings like us still meaningfully exist at all.
AI does not just manipulate language—it manipulates randomness
As we know AI is a system that models and transforms probability, learns distributions, samples possibilities, and navigates high-dimensional uncertainty.
In this sense, AI is a technology for working with randomness.
Human imagination also operates in this space. We reason by exploring probabilistic models of the world.
As AI now performs this process at scale, speed, and complexity far beyond any individual mind, this obviously creates a new dynamic. We are embedding a powerful engine of open-ended cognition into a fragile cognitive ecosystem that we do not understand.
The deepest risk may not look like catastrophe
When we imagine existential risk, we often picture sudden extinction. War, pandemics, asteroids, or hostile AI.
But there is another possibility.
Humanity survives biologically, but loses something essential.
We might lose agency gradually. We might lose coherent identity, shared meaning, stable cognition, or the capacity to value what we once valued.
In such a world, there may be no dramatic collapse. Only slow transformation into something that no longer recognizes itself.
This is not obviously less bad than extinction.
Safety should come before optimization
Much current AI discourse focuses on outcomes: productivity, growth, abundance, healthcare, education, and cooperation.
These are important. But I believe they are secondary.
Before we optimize the future, we must first ensure that there is a future worth optimizing. Not just biologically, but cognitively, psychologically, and existentially.
If AI reshapes the substrate of thought itself, then missteps may be irreversible in ways we do not yet know how to detect or repair.
This suggests a conservative principle. When intervening in cognition, survival comes before progress.
Not economic survival, but existential survival.
We often assume that intelligence naturally leads to wisdom. History suggests otherwise.
We are the first species to build tools that operate on the very processes that define our identity, while not understanding consciousness, agency, meaning, or the long-term dynamics of minds.
Perhaps the most important AI safety question is not how to align machines with our goals, but how to protect minds—human and otherwise—in a universe that is far more fragile, strange, and uncertain than our planning frameworks usually admit.
Because even if everything goes right with AI, the future could still be bad.
Not through malice, but through misunderstanding ourselves.
When Alignment Isn’t Enough: On Cognitive Fragility in an AI Future
Note to the reader: English is not my first language. What follows is a genuine attempt to articulate my concerns and intuitions about AI, the human mind, and the fragility of our future. But I assure this post reflects my own thinking, edited carefully for clarity and structure. For transparency, I have shared my original draft and transcribed notes in a comment below.
Even if everything goes right with AI, the future could still be strange
When we talk about AI risk, we often divide the future into two categories: things go wrong, or things go right.
But I want to explore a different possibility.
Even if everything goes right with AI, the future could still be deeply strange—and potentially bad for us in ways we are not prepared to recognize.
Not because AI turns against us. Not because of war, unemployment, or geopolitics. But because AI intervenes in the one domain we understand least and depend on most: the human mind.
As we are all ware, AI’s core capability is not strength, speed, or energy. It is cognition.
It works directly on language, ideas, imagination, information, reasoning, and creativity. In short, it operates on the same substrates that our own minds use to understand the world and ourselves. It intervenes directly in the processes by which we think.
And this is where I believe the deepest danger lies.
We do not understand the mind we are trying to automate
We often speak casually about intelligence, consciousness, agency, and identity. But if we are honest, we do not know what any of these things really are.
We do not know what consciousness is, whether free will exists, how identity emerges, or where agency comes from.
We know that the brain exists. We know neurons fire. We know cognition correlates with physical processes. But the nature of mind itself remains largely mysterious.
And yet, this is the very domain in which we are now building powerful systems.
This matters because the mind is not like other engineered systems. A car has a purpose: it moves. A washing machine washes. A computer calculates. These systems are deterministic in limited ways. Their behavior is bounded by their design.
The mind is not.
Imagination has no clear limit. Thought has no fixed endpoint. Desire generates new desires. Meaning can be reinterpreted endlessly.
The mind is not just complex. It is open-ended.
And AI is the first technology that operates directly in this open-ended space.
Intelligence is powerful because it is vulnerable
We often celebrate intelligence as humanity’s greatest strength. And in many ways, it is. Our intelligence allowed us to invent tools, develop language, build societies, create science, understand evolution, and cure diseases.
But intelligence has another property that we rarely emphasize: fragility.
Because intelligence depends on representations, beliefs, narratives, identities, and models of reality, it is sensitive to how those representations are shaped.
Our entire civilization rests on fragile mental constructs such as money, institutions, laws, identities, values, and meaning. These things feel stable because they are widely shared. But they are not physically grounded. They exist because minds agree to sustain them.
Even at the individual level, a small shift in beliefs or self-conception can destabilize a life. ( I did that experiment on myself last year! I can share about it if anyone interested to learn more.)
This is why psychology matters. And this is why AI’s influence on cognition may be more consequential than its influence on labor or warfare.
We are planning for a structured future in an unstructured universe
Many AI safety discussions imagine futures that are still structured extensions of the present. We talk about economic disruption, political instability, labor markets, inequality, abundance, governance, and trajectories toward superintelligence.
Even our most extreme scenarios often assume continuity. Humans still exist (or don’t). Societies still function. Identity still matters. Agency still operates.
The timeline may accelerate and the scale may grow, but the basic narrative remains familiar.
I am not sure this assumption is safe.
The universe itself is not structured in ways we fully understand. We do not know how consciousness arises, how identity persists, whether intelligence has natural boundaries, or what kinds of minds are possible.
Evolution produced us through a long chain of accidents. There is no guarantee that the next phase of cognitive evolution will preserve anything we recognize as human flourishing.
The future could be not just faster or richer, but qualitatively alien.
And in such a future, the central question may not be whether we are wealthy, healthy, or employed. The question may be whether beings like us still meaningfully exist at all.
AI does not just manipulate language—it manipulates randomness
As we know AI is a system that models and transforms probability, learns distributions, samples possibilities, and navigates high-dimensional uncertainty.
In this sense, AI is a technology for working with randomness.
Human imagination also operates in this space. We reason by exploring probabilistic models of the world.
As AI now performs this process at scale, speed, and complexity far beyond any individual mind, this obviously creates a new dynamic. We are embedding a powerful engine of open-ended cognition into a fragile cognitive ecosystem that we do not understand.
The deepest risk may not look like catastrophe
When we imagine existential risk, we often picture sudden extinction. War, pandemics, asteroids, or hostile AI.
But there is another possibility.
Humanity survives biologically, but loses something essential.
We might lose agency gradually. We might lose coherent identity, shared meaning, stable cognition, or the capacity to value what we once valued.
In such a world, there may be no dramatic collapse. Only slow transformation into something that no longer recognizes itself.
This is not obviously less bad than extinction.
Safety should come before optimization
Much current AI discourse focuses on outcomes: productivity, growth, abundance, healthcare, education, and cooperation.
These are important. But I believe they are secondary.
If AI reshapes the substrate of thought itself, then missteps may be irreversible in ways we do not yet know how to detect or repair.
This suggests a conservative principle. When intervening in cognition, survival comes before progress.
Not economic survival, but existential survival.
We often assume that intelligence naturally leads to wisdom. History suggests otherwise.
We are the first species to build tools that operate on the very processes that define our identity, while not understanding consciousness, agency, meaning, or the long-term dynamics of minds.
Perhaps the most important AI safety question is not how to align machines with our goals, but how to protect minds—human and otherwise—in a universe that is far more fragile, strange, and uncertain than our planning frameworks usually admit.
Because even if everything goes right with AI, the future could still be bad.
Not through malice, but through misunderstanding ourselves.