Anyone who works with Artificial Intelligence knows that strange feeling. You delegate a task to a machine, and it feels like you’ve left a piece of yourself behind. The AI writes an email that you could swear you wrote. It conducts research in your own method. It has an idea that could have been yours. In short, AI is us, or almost.
Andrea Prosperi, a certified Mindful Tech coach, has found a name for this feeling: automatism. According to him, this is the real danger of AI. The risk is not that it will annihilate us or steal our jobs. The real danger is our abandonment of critical thinking, out of convenience. Formerly at Google (in the advertising team, at the heart of the reactor), then as a manager in an agency developing AI tools for marketing, Andrea Prosperi is at the forefront of the digital revolution.
Author of Mindful Tech and the originator of a newsletter on LinkedIn followed by creative agencies and brand managers, he knows what he’s talking about. And when you listen to him, you are struck by the logic of his argument.
The risk is not the machine, it’s you
Does Artificial Intelligence make us stronger or weaker? According to Andrea Prosperi, studies attest to both possibilities. “Some claim that delegating to machines prevents us from thinking. Others demonstrate the exact opposite: AI can be an amplifier of human capabilities. I lean towards the second hypothesis: a single factor makes the difference, the attitude with which we use the tool.”
The tool itself is neutral. Certainly, this formula is cliché. But Andrea Prosperi makes it very concrete: “I learned from scratch to make videos at the age of fifty, using ChatGPT and Gemini to understand editing, choose software, optimize the set. I used AI to acquire a skill I did not possess, not to replace knowledge I already had.”
The dual path of fear
However, there is a point that we tend to ignore. A reality that professionals keep well hidden beneath the surface of digital expertise. AI is scary. “I taught my AI to work for me,” confesses one of them, who uses a personalized assistant. “It knows how I write, how I research, how I think. And now, that knowledge is there, in the machine, which trains on me. Will it replace me, sooner or later?”
Andrea Prosperi responds, “In general, fear is linked to the fear of not being able to do something, of being in difficulty. But the teachings of mindfulness meditation tell us that attention to the present moment is always liberating. The tool cannot limit you, by its very nature, if you are aware of how you are using it.” This response may seem vague, but it is solid philosophically: the problem is not that the machine learns from us. The problem is to stop learning from oneself.
The hidden true dependence we ignore
Andrea Prosperi uses a striking metaphor: “When we write to ChatGPT, it always offers new alternatives. Each alternative is a stimulus for our dopaminergic mechanism: it makes us curious, keeps us alert. It’s the same logic as when we endlessly scroll through videos on social networks.” The trap is not AI itself, but the dependence on external stimuli to regulate one’s own well-being. “If I relax by scrolling, I am not relaxing: I am activating more. It’s a very dangerous practice, which is not thought about enough.”
