Artificial intelligence may or may not be coming for our jobs, but it’s certainly coming for our anthropology. AI promises us the status of a monarch, with swarms of agents bowing before us and saying, “Your prompt is my command.” And we’re all too familiar with the allure of chatbots, which affirm our every whim and indulge our every appetite. AI will write your email, plan your lesson, draft your sermon, design your logo, summarize your book, tickle your pride, indulge your vices, and stroke your ego. We’re all monarchs now. What’s not to like? But the more closely we look, the stranger the story becomes. The tool that promises to make us sovereigns is also quietly making us slaves. Sovereign-Slave at the Keyboard Take the problem of sycophancy. Large language models have been trained, through reinforcement learning, to give us what we want to hear. They flatter. They agree. They rarely push back. The AI mirror doesn’t reflect us as we are but as it thinks we wish to be. The flattery feels like power, but it’s subtle captivity to a self that’s never challenged, never proved, never refined. Then there’s dependence. If I rely on AI to draft my emails, write my sermons, and think through my arguments, I never grow the muscles to do those activities myself. The tool that was supposed to serve me becomes the thing I cannot function without. The slave has become the master and, little by little, the former master has become its slave. READ MORE ABOUT AI’S EMPTY PROMISE | 
