Everyone working with Artificial Intelligence is familiar with this strange feeling. When we delegate a task to a machine, it feels like we have left a part of ourselves behind. The AI drafts an email that we could swear we wrote. It conducts research in our own method. It has an idea that could have been ours. In short, AI is us, or almost.
Andrea Prosperi, certified coach at Mindful Tech, has coined a term for this feeling: automation. 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 peril is our abandonment of critical thinking, out of convenience. A former Google employee (advertising team, at the heart of the agency), and then a manager in an agency that develops 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 tasks to machines prevents us from thinking. Others demonstrate exactly the opposite: AI can be an amplifier of human capabilities. I lean towards the second hypothesis: one factor makes the difference, the attitude with which we use the tool.”
The tool itself is neutral. Certainly, this formula is overused. But Andrea Prosperi makes it very concrete: “I learned from scratch how to make videos at the age of fifty, using ChatGPT and Gemini to understand editing, choose software, optimize the decor. 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 reality that professionals tend to ignore. A reality that is kept well hidden beneath the surface of digital expertise. AI is scary. “I learned my AI to work for me,” confides one professional, 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 is training on me. Will it replace me, sooner or later?”
Andrea Prosperi responds: “Fear, in general, is related 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 answer 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 real addiction 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 exactly the same logic as when we endlessly scroll through videos on social networks.” The trap is not AI itself, but the addiction to external stimuli to regulate one’s own well-being. “If I relax by scrolling, I’m not relaxing: I’m actually becoming more active. It’s a very dangerous practice, which we don’t reflect on enough.”
