New essay. I am worried that we might entrust more and more of our thinking to machines, and gradually cease to sustain the habits and institutions through which we had once cultivated our minds. I am worried that we might entrust more and more of our thinking to machines, and gradually cease to sustain the habits and institutions through which we had once cultivated our minds. Such a surrender might happen amid considerable prosperity and be celebrated, at every stage, as progress. Each concession would come with an excellent justification: an economy of effort, a saving of time or an answer superior to anything we could produce ourselves. Only slowly would it become apparent that, in relieving ourselves of the burden of understanding, we had also diminished our capacity to govern our affairs. And by then, a preference for machine rule might seem entirely sensible. It would materialise not through violent and forced takeover, but by our own volition, with our own diminished abilities the strongest argument for such an arrangement.