AI Was Never A Tool
One
A new report this month from Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center is out and it is a wonderful and substantial read! It asks what human resilience will require in the AI age. This is the 52nd in the center’s long-running Future of Digital Life series, based on a canvassing of hundreds of experts, with 386 respondents overall and 251 written essays. The most recent report spans 11 chapters, moving through human agency, institutional change, existential literacy, work, inequality, human connection, complacency, misinformation and, finally, the conditions for human flourishing.
There have been some great summaries along with press coverage and wrap-ups and there is so much in there that everyone will have their own angle on what it contains. For me though, it was the feeling, reading through it, that a wider field is now beginning to speak more openly about a condition I have been trying to name for some time.
For years, much of the public conversation about AI has remained stuck at the instrumentalist level, portraying AI as a tool. What can it do? How should we use it? How quickly is it improving? How should it be regulated? This report does not stay there.
Again and again, the report’s contributors, among them Vint Cerf, Sherry Turkle, Doc Searls, Paul Saffo and David Brin, describe something larger and harder to see. AI is not simply seen as an application layer, but as an ambient system shaping the conditions in which decisions are made, risks assessed, opportunities distributed and identities recognised. The report’s own language is telling. AI is described as becoming the “invisible operating system of society,” shaping how opportunity is distributed, services delivered, risks managed and rights experienced.
That distinction matters. Once AI is understood not as a tool that we pick up, but as part of the environment we live inside, resilience stops being a matter of personal coping alone. It becomes a question of what kinds of institutions, habits, social forms and interior capacities can still exist under increasingly anticipatory, automated and system-led conditions.
Lee Rainie (co-author of the report alongside Janna Quitney Anderson) said one of the surprises of the project was that what began as a question about individual resilience kept returning, through the responses, to a systems-level answer. That feels exactly right. The issue is not only whether people can adapt to AI. It is whether the conditions of human agency can survive life inside it.
Regular readers will recognise this move. I have been making it for some time in talks, essays and keynote work, arguing that AI has to be understood less as a tool than as an environment. It is a point I made in my EDAY presentation in Amsterdam last October, drawing on one of my favourite McLuhan quotes, "Media effects are new environments as imperceptible as water to a fish, subliminal for the most part.” As usual, any interesting and as yet unnoticed point about the world around us has already been made by McLuhan.
So what I saw in this report was not surprise. It was recognition.
My own contribution is highlighted, leading Chapter 1, “Cultivating Human Agency and Prioritizing Autonomy.” Quite rightly, agency comes first as it is the front-line issue (as far as I'm concerned). The early chapters make plain that the central concern is not simply technical acceleration, it is the gradual weakening of human judgement and self-direction as AI systems become more embedded, more invisible and more woven into the practical and institutional fabric of life. The report identifies loss of agency as the leading concern, warning that AI systems may increasingly curate information, predict behaviour and automate the systems that oversee and direct people’s lives.
From there the report opens out into the wider terrain. Chapter 2 argues that institutions, not just individuals, must now restructure for resilience. Chapter 4 turns to “existential literacy,” which is one of the more useful phrases in the report: not just literacy in using systems, but literacy in how technologies reshape values, goals, identities and ways of seeing. Other chapters take up labour disruption, widening inequalities, the fraying of human connection, the lure of convenience, the collapse of shared reality, and the need for epistemic vigilance in a synthetic information environment. It is packed with useful thoughts and sharp formulations, whether to reflect on yourself or use to provoke a client.
And that is where Me:chine enters.
In my essay, I argue that modern humans are now simultaneously machinable and unmachinable. We are increasingly legible to systems through data, metrics, credentials, biometrics, behavioural traces and prediction. But there remains another dimension of the self that is not so easily reduced: judgement, meaning-making, ethical reasoning, imagination, intuition, adaptability. In an AI-saturated environment, resilience is not achieved by rejecting technology, nor by surrendering to it, but by sustaining those unmachinable dimensions of human identity within machinic systems. That formulation was also surfaced in the report’s official release materials, which suggests this language is meeting a wider moment.
What struck me was how often the wider report circles the same terrain from different angles. The fear of moral deskilling. The over-trusting of fluent systems. The erosion of shared reality. The loss of solitude. The replacement of interpretation with recommendation. The possibility that people cease to practise the very faculties they will most need in order to remain human.
Some of the lines in the report are memorable because they catch that shift so sharply. Alf Rehn warns of the most dangerous kind of resilience: the kind that looks like stability but is actually surrender. Paul Saffo suggests that what AI may ultimately take from us is solitude. Roger Spitz warns not of superintelligence but of “superstupidity” where humans become dangerously reliant on systems they no longer understand. Read together, these are not just striking turns of phrase. They point to the same deeper concern. The real risk is not only what machines become. It is what humans become in response.
That, to me, is the report’s real significance.
It signals that serious AI discourse is broadening. Away from capability alone, away from the productivity story, away even from safety in the narrow technical sense. And toward a more profound question: what must remain unmachinable if dignity, judgement, authorship and interior life are to survive increasingly machinic systems?
If you’d like to read my essay, it is here: https://imaginingthedigitalfuture.org/reports-and-publications/human-resilience-in-the-age-of-ai/cultivating-human-agency/ And if you’d like to read the full report, it is here: https://imaginingthedigitalfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ITDF-Human-Resilience-full-report-3.20.26.pdf
I’ll share the earlier EDAY presentation separately for those interested in the continuity of the argument. It will also sit on my website under Papers, alongside other presentations and published work. https://www.futuremade.group
Two
The Bolt Signals, systems and the self at the frontier of futures
The Bolt is the broader monthly newsletter from across the full range of my work. It brings together the themes I’m speaking on, the Systems & Self model, the technological, geopolitical and societal shifts I’m tracking, the futures tools and frameworks I’m developing, and the new frontiers shaping where the work is going next.
It also includes links to my BBC Radio 4 DOUGH episodes on the future of everyday products and services, most recently smart glasses and mobile phones, along with selected slides, transcripts and research papers where I can share them. I usually send it once a month, occasionally twice.
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And finally, three
The Future of You audiobook reaches its final chapter roll out and conclusion next week.
If you’ve been listening along, thank you. If not, this is a good moment to catch the ending: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-future-of-you/id1601676081?i=1000763127755