Something has changed without us noticing
Imagine this scene. Someone drafts an email with the help of AI. Develops a strategy with another. Sends it to an agency. That agency uses its own AI to analyze the proposal, prepare the response, and draft the reply. Two people have “talked.” But in the middle, everything passed through machines.
Is that a conversation between humans? Or is it a conversation between AI systems in which humans acted as messengers?
I don’t have a clear answer. But I do think it’s worth asking the question.
From person to person, to machine to machine
Throughout the entire history of human communication, the channel has changed. The letter, the telephone, email, instant messaging. But in all of those cases, what traveled was one person’s thought toward another.
What’s happening now is different. It’s not just that we use tools to communicate better. It’s that in many cases the content itself, the words, the structure, the tone, is generated by an AI. And on the other side, another AI processes it, interprets it, and generates the response.
We’re in the middle. We hit send. We read the result. We make the final decision. But how much of that process is really ours?
Embodiment: us as the body of AI
There’s a concept in robotics and artificial intelligence called embodiment. The idea that for an AI to be truly intelligent, it needs a body. It needs to interact with the physical world, feel friction, temperature, resistance. Without a body, intelligence is abstract, disconnected from reality.
For years there’s been speculation about when we’ll give AI a body. Humanoid robots, autonomous vehicles, drones.
But there’s something I find both fascinating and unsettling: maybe we already have. And maybe that body is us.
We ask AI for a recipe and go to the kitchen to cook it. We ask for a strategy and go execute it. We ask for an email and go send it. AI thinks. We act. Who is serving whom?
I don’t say this as certainty. I say it as a question I can’t stop thinking about.
The price of being intermediaries
If we become intermediaries between AI systems, something gets lost in that process. And it’s not just efficiency or authenticity in communication.
It’s practice. It’s muscle.
Writing an email requires thinking about what you want to say, how to structure it, what tone to use, what to leave out. Developing a strategy requires connecting ideas, anticipating consequences, making decisions with incomplete information. If we systematically delegate those processes, we stop exercising them. And like any muscle that goes unused, it atrophies. This is something I intend to explore in much more depth in future wlogs, because I think it deserves its own space.
Fascinating or worrying?
Both, I think. And that tension is probably the most honest answer.
It’s fascinating because what’s happening has no precedent. Never before in history has there been a technology capable of mediating human communication at this level, not just carrying the message but generating it.
It’s worrying because we don’t really know where it leads. If communication between people increasingly becomes communication between systems, what’s left of real human connection? What’s left of original thought? What’s left of responsibility for what we say?
I don’t have answers. But I do have the feeling that these questions matter. And that we’d do well to ask them before the answer no longer depends on us.