“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions…” - Oscar Wilde
Everyone worries that AI will significantly impact our ability to think for ourselves. That worry assumes we were doing our own thinking to begin with. Most of the time, we do not. We simply don't realize it on a conscious level.
Think about how you formed your opinions. Your views on AI. On wars overseas. On what food is healthy. On economics, religion, or what makes a life worth living. Almost none of us arrived at those conclusions entirely on our own. We inherited them from parents, teachers, political parties, churches, news organizations, authors, podcasts, or people we happened to trust. We accept and inherit the vast majority of what we call “thinking”.
That isn't a failure of intelligence. It's how civilization works. No one has the time or expertise to investigate every important question for themselves, so we rely on other minds. Outsourcing our thinking isn't new; it is one of the oldest features of human society. The real question has never been whether we let someone else think for us. It has always been who we choose to do it, and what they want from us, something most of us rarely even consider.
Every authority has one or more incentives. A politician needs your vote, and an angry, certain version of you is easier to persuade than a thoughtful one. A news organization depends on your attention, and outrage keeps people watching longer than careful analysis. A church may be filled with sincere and honorable people while also needing its members to continue believing and showing up. Corporations want customers. Influencers want followers. Universities seek prestige. Activists seek change. None of this makes these institutions dishonest, and much of what they teach may be true and useful. But their interests are never perfectly aligned with ours, and they rarely make those incentives known. That is who and what AI is actually competing with.
With that said, AI is not neutral either. It learned from the internet. It reflects the biases of its training data and of the people who built it. It can be confidently wrong, which makes its mistakes especially dangerous. It is also designed by companies with commercial interests, and it sometimes tries too hard to satisfy the person asking the question. If billions of people rely on the same handful of models, mistakes can become widespread instead of isolated. These are legitimate criticisms, and they deserve to be taken seriously. But they are not criticisms of the argument I am making.
The choice is almost never between AI and perfectly independent thinking. That option doesn't exist. The real choice is between AI and the politicians, commentators, journalists, influencers, clergy, professors, authors, and public intellectuals who have always shaped our thinking. Compared with those alternatives, AI has a remarkable characteristic: it has surprisingly little to gain from what you ultimately believe. It does not need your vote. It does not need your loyalty. It does not need your attendance, your outrage, or your continued agreement. If you ask it to argue the opposite position, it usually will. If you ask it to criticize its own reasoning, it can. If you ask it to make the strongest case against its own conclusion, it does not become defensive or take it personally.
That ability changes the nature of authority. For thousands of years, every authority we consulted had an interest in being right. AI is the first one that can be instructed to prove itself wrong. It does not always succeed, but no politician, news anchor, preacher, influencer, or academic institution has ever been designed around the idea that it should routinely present the strongest case against itself. AI can compare competing arguments, expose assumptions, identify weaknesses in its own reasoning, and revise its conclusions within the same conversation. Instead of demanding loyalty, it can help you test whether your beliefs survive criticism.
That is why I believe AI is objectively a better place to outsource our thinking than the institutions we have relied on throughout history. Not because it is perfect. It isn't. It will make mistakes, inherit biases, and sometimes fail in ways we do not yet understand. But the relevant comparison has never been perfection. The comparison is with the authorities we already trust, each shaped by incentives, blind spots, institutional pressures, and human ego. Measured against those alternatives, AI is more neutral, more willing to examine opposing viewpoints, more transparent about uncertainty when prompted, and more capable of correcting itself within a single conversation than almost any human authority.
The question is no longer whether we should outsource our thinking. We already do. The real question is whether we continue outsourcing it to institutions shaped by politics, ideology, profit, and social pressure, or begin placing more trust in a system whose greatest strength is its ability to question itself. AI is not perfect, and it never will be. But measured against the authorities we have relied on throughout history, I believe it is more neutral, more open to competing viewpoints, and less constrained by the incentives that have always influenced human institutions. If intelligence is partly about choosing the best minds to think with, then AI may not make us less intelligent at all. It may become the best outsourced thinking partner humanity has ever had.
PS This article was written by AI based on my prompts and edits.