Not Becoming a Puppet of Others

A few years ago, I came across something I had written even earlier, on citizen participation, where I had mentioned artificial intelligence. I hadn't remembered writing it. It shocked me a little to find it.

I now have a greater appreciation for a Munk Dialogue I listened to during Covid with the philosopher Daniel Dennett, where he discussed human consciousness, autonomy, and the importance of not becoming a puppet of others.

That is a leadership challenge. Of self, and of others.

AI is accelerating faster than most conversations about it can keep pace with. It is here. That is not the question. The question is whether we maintain our own agency and voice in a world increasingly shaped by something that can imitate us convincingly without ever being us.

It takes an outside-in and inside-out perspective to hold onto that. Seeing how the world sees you. Knowing, underneath it, who you actually are. Most leadership conversations only address one side.

I don't think this is a distant or theoretical concern. It shows up in smaller ways daily. In how quickly we defer to whatever the algorithm surfaces first. In how much of our own thinking we are willing to skip past to get to an answer faster.

Dennett's warning was not about robots taking over. It was about something quieter and more immediate. The slow surrender of one's own agency to systems, ideas, or people that do the thinking for us, until we no longer notice we have stopped doing it ourselves.

That is where the work begins.