Is technology simply a tool in our hands, or is it also shaping how we remember, think, and express ourselves? I used to treat this as a theoretical question. But since I started using AI regularly, the question has become impossible to keep abstract.
There is a detail in Chiang's story that stayed with me: after Jijingi learns to write, he realizes he has started "thinking like Europeans." No one taught him European ideas. It was the act of writing itself that carried a cognitive style—he began to organize his thoughts linearly, to fix things on the page so they could be checked and verified. The tool changed not just his efficiency, but the way he thought.
This unsettles me because I see my own relationship with AI heading down the same path. At first, AI felt like it was simply helping me work faster. But gradually I noticed that I was leaning more and more on the ready-made expressions it offered—it would suggest a sentence structure and I would think "that works" and accept it; it would organize an argument for me and I would think "that flows well" and move on. The question is whether these judgments of "that works" and "that flows well" are truly my own, or preferences I have been trained into without realizing it.
McLuhan argues that we always understand new media through a "rearview mirror"—seeing cars as faster carriages, screens as better pages. But media are not neutral channels; they are environments. To enter a medium is to enter a whole new set of rhythms, attention patterns, and social expectations. This resonates closely with Chiang's story: Jijingi did not "choose" the cognitive style of literate culture. Writing, as an environment, gradually shaped him into a different person.
Chiang offers yet another dimension. In oral culture, "truth" (mimi) serves social harmony—it is flexible and negotiable. In literate culture, "truth" (vough) pursues the precision of the record, regardless of whether that precision causes harm. As AI makes our expression increasingly "accurate" and "fluent," might it also be quietly narrowing what we are able to do—such as the capacity for ambiguity, or the space to maintain a relationship through less-than-precise means?
I am not yet sure how to face all of this. But I increasingly feel that AI should not be treated as an add-on tool—it may already be changing the way I organize my thoughts, and this change is precisely hard to notice because it arrives so gently. Whenever I feel the pull of "this is just too convenient," I want to stop and ask myself: what kind of person is this convenience imperceptibly training me to become? What is it taking away, even as it gives?