You probably wouldn't think twice about using AI to find the perfect song for Christmas this year. That's exactly how deeply AI has rooted itself in our daily life. Recent trends suggest AI is set to become core to everything humans interact with in the days ahead. So what is AI, and why are humans depending on it for almost everything we do?

AI is a computing system capable of performing tasks associated with human intelligence on learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making. It has become such an essential part of day-to-day life that it's now a must-have app on your phone or a go-to website in your browser. From finding a good song to generating a new one, AI is that convenient and accessible. And the AI most of us use is still a basic level of AI (Narrow AI) one that works only within a set of constraints and cannot think on its own. People depend on AI for everything from basic calculations to advanced work. AI has evolved from merely a tool into a companion, one that helps list daily to-do lists and jot down research ideas.

A few years ago, writing tedious code required professionals and took days. Today, a 10-year-old can write code in minutes using a tool like Claude. The speed of this transition is striking. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will probably be developed by 2030. Beyond that lies ASI a super intelligent system capable of fully outperforming human intelligence and self-learning. AI in the future will reshape not just how we work, but how we think, feel, and reason. This shift will potentially bring both immense opportunities and threats to human civilization.

AI today improves life as it has brought revolution to healthcare, finance, transportation, education, manufacturing, and more. But it has also brought risks: job displacement, privacy concerns, and bias and discrimination, all of which are already impacting social life. Beyond that, here are some specific ways AI is affecting human beings:

1) Drop in brain activity
A recent study divided participants into three groups: an LLM group, a Search Engine group, and a Brain-only group, and assigned each to write an essay. The research found that using LLMs was more convenient than the other methods, but that convenience came with a cognitive cost, diminishing users' inclination to question the outputs. Higher satisfaction and stronger brain activity were seen only in the Brain-only group.

2) Stop questioning outputs
Today, people blindly rely on AI for generating travel itineraries, following Google Maps, letting autocomplete finish sentences that allow AI to make cognitive decisions without a second thought. This means the brain no longer constructs the answer or opinion itself; it depends on an external system instead. The real issue is this: what happens when judgment comes from somewhere other than your own brain? What if this automation bias eventually takes over entirely?

3) Affects emotion and physical behavior
A study by OpenAI and MIT Media Lab (the loneliness study) found that higher emotional dependence, lower socialization, and distress are correlated with higher dependence on AI. AI offers people immediate relief in exchange for long-term dependency which is much like the analogy that alcohol reduces social anxiety momentarily while deepening it over time.

Stanford HAI's repository points to metacognitive erosion (the declining ability to monitor, evaluate, and regulate one's own thinking), as a real risk of this pattern. People increasingly recognize and accept AI's output rather than questioning it or constructing knowledge themselves. Above all, children's minds must not be shaped to depend on AI. This doesn't mean abandoning AI rather only ensuring it's used wisely. The mind isn't just a processor; it's a vessel through which we author our identities and societies, and that needs to be understood. From boardrooms to battlefields, from classrooms to courtrooms, from the natural environment to the furthest reaches of creative expression AI is no longer just supporting decisions. It is increasingly making them and we must be the ones to control it.