Artificial Intelligence

For years, artificial intelligence felt impressive but strangely limited. It could answer questions, summarize documents, and generate text that sounded eerily human. Yet, when the moment came to do something—book a flight, analyze a spreadsheet, fix a broken workflow—it stopped short. It talked, but it didn’t act. That boundary is now dissolving. By 2026, a new class of systems known as Agentic AI is quietly reshaping how humans interact with machines. These systems don’t merely respond to prompts. They plan, decide, execute, and adapt across tools, platforms, and environments. Instead of being conversational oracles, they function more like digital employees—autonomous agents capable of carrying out complex tasks with minimal supervision. This shift marks one of the most important tra...

In early 2025, a study published in the journal Societies reignited a debate many had sensed intuitively but struggled to prove: the more people rely on artificial intelligence to think for them, the less they seem to think for themselves. Led by researcher Michael Gerlich, the study did not frame AI as an enemy or a dystopian force. Instead, it highlighted something far more subtle and unsettling—a slow cognitive drift caused not by AI’s power, but by our comfort with surrendering effort. The findings were clear and uncomfortable. Individuals who frequently delegated tasks such as reasoning, evaluation, synthesis, and decision-making to AI tools scored significantly lower on validated critical thinking assessments than those who used AI sparingly. The mechanism behind this decline was no...