Who are we becoming in the age of AI?

For the first time in years, adults are starting to think like children again -- thanks to AI.

I was fortunate to hear from a subject matter expert from Harvard talking about automatic brain found in kids vs conscious brain found in adults once the pre-frontal brain developes.

So , I watched a few kids interact with the world. They don’t overthink. They explore. They try things instinctively. Their brain indeed operates in an automatic mode .. curious , fluid , unstructured and action oriented.

Then I watched adults interacting — includes me too. We pause. We analyse. We structure our thoughts. We think before we act. More than action we try and see “value” from our actions. Years of education and experience have trained us to move from “instinct to intention”.

Now let’s introduce AI into this equation. Something interesting begins to happen.

We open an AI tool .. and instead of thinking deeply, we start exploring again.
– we try prompts.
– we tweak outputs.
– we follow suggestions.
– we click on suggested next best actions at the end of the answer and more ..

These are actions almost like a child discovering possibilities. AI is reducing the cost of action so dramatically that it is changing how we engage with thinking itself.

“Effort” is no longer required to begin and when effort drops , behaviour shifts. Adults , who were once conditioned to think consciously before acting , are beginning to act first and refine later.

Prompt –> Output –> Iterate
Instead of:
Think –> Structure –> Execute

Don’t take this necessarily as a regression. May be a good way to look at it as by calling it “rebalancing”.

– from rigid thinking to fluid exploration.
– from effort-heavy creation to idea-driven iteration.

But it also raises a deeper question.

If AI is enabling us to behave more like our instinctive selves , what happens to deliberate thinking?

Because identity was once shaped by effort. [ physics definition – it is the energy input used to move, lift, or manipulate etc ]

– writing something yourself.
– solving something step by step.
– building clarity over time.
– finding mehod for maturing ideation.

Now, that journey is compressed. So the real shift is not just in productivity. It is in cognition and over time , cognition shapes identity.

AI is not just changing what we do. It is quietly changing how we think and who we become.

Until next time .. happy thinking!

Author – Sumit Rajwade, Co-founder: mPrompto