Any person working with Artificial Intelligence knows this 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 using your own method. It has an idea that could have been yours. In short, AI is us, or almost.
Andrea Prosperi, a certified coach at Mindful Tech, has coined a name for this feeling: automation. According to him, this is the true danger of AI. The risk is not that it will destroy us or steal our jobs. The real danger is our surrender to critical thinking, out of convenience. A former Google employee (advertising team, at the core of the reactor), then 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 creator 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, the logic of his argument is striking.
The risk is not the machine, it’s you
Does Artificial Intelligence make us stronger or weaker? According to Andrea Prosperi, studies confirm 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 latter hypothesis: one 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 how 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 didn’t have, not to replace a knowledge I already had.”
The double path of fear
However, there is an aspect that is often overlooked. A reality that professionals keep hidden beneath the surface of digital expertise. AI is scary. “I taught my AI to work for me,” confides one of them, who uses a personalized assistant. “She knows how I write, how I research, how I think. And now, that knowledge is there, in the machine, training on me. Will she replace me, sooner or later?”
Andrea Prosperi responds, “Fear, in general, 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 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 dependence we ignore
Andrea Prosperi uses a striking metaphor: “When we write on 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 scrolling through videos endlessly 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’m not actually relaxing: I’m activating even more. It’s a very dangerous practice, on which we don’t reflect enough.”
