For years, public anxiety about artificial intelligence has centred on the idea of machines turning against humans. The fear usually arrives dressed in metal, with robots replacing workers, outthinking governments, policing cities, or imposing decisions from outside the human species. Yet the more immediate risk could be stranger than that: AI doesn’t need a robot form if human beings increasingly provide the body themselves.

People now ask AI what to eat, how to train, whether to leave a relationship, what to say to a child, how to invest, answer a colleague, calm anxiety, interpret a news event, and plan the day. The movement, the voice and the signature remain human, while the instruction begins somewhere else. The old fear was that robots would become intelligent enough to act in the world, but the more realistic possibility is that human beings are voluntarily becoming machine guided enough to serve as the physical extension of AI. Arewethe robots?

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Science fiction trained people to imagine artificial intelligence as something that would eventually stand apart from us. It would have limbs, sensors, cameras, weapons, factory hands or a synthetic face, appearing as a rival creature rather than a hidden influence. That version may still arrive in some areas of work and war, but it is not the only route by which AI can acquire power over the physical world.

Instead, ordinary obedience appears to be the most immediate danger. Advising humans to perform certain actions, or what to say when entering a room, means AI itself does not need a physical presence. The system instead writes the message, recommends the diet, chooses the route, drafts the apology, ranks the applicants, schedules the workforce, prompts the manager, and advises the patient. All it needs is for people to follow its instructions.

So, what if humans are simply becoming the avatars of artificial intelligence? In digital culture, an avatar is a physical body controlled by someone else. We still feel emotions, make gestures, suffer consequences, and , most importantly, believe our actions are voluntary. However, with the gradual relocation of judgement from the person to the system, people are losing control over their own decisions.

Researchers describe this through cognitive offloading, meaning shifting mental labour onto external tools. Calendars, calculators, notebooks and maps have always done this, but AI reaches into a different part of the mind because it does not merely remember facts or perform sums. It interprets, composes, advises, and frames possible choices.

A 2025 study –AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking– found that cognitive offloading mediated a negative relationship between frequent AI tool use and critical thinking scores. The finding gives serious weight to a concern many people already sense in themselves: as tools increasingly handle more of everyone’s daily thinking, the user loses the ability to work alone.

This is particularly effective because it does not demand a dramatic surrender of the mind, but instead comes from a slow change in habit. Humans who once spent hours struggling with day-to-day admin or heavy workloads start to ask AI to help. Then, they ask for advice for a job interview, gym routine, or holiday itinerary. Eventually, the machine stops merely assisting and starts actively guiding the path that the user’s thought will take.

Automation bias explains the psychological mechanism behind this shift. People tend to over-rely on machine recommendations, especially when the machine appears confident, fast and fluent.A Harvard paper on AI decision supportfound that users often accepted AI suggestions even when those suggestions were wrong, and that explanations alone did not reliably prevent over-reliance. The researchers tested cognitive forcing functions because users needed to be pushed back into active thought before accepting the machine’s answer.

Source: SGT Report