The illusion of distance: work, AI and the risk of losing ourselves
We are experiencing an invisible revolution, deeper than any other, which is not measured in factories or tons of steel, but in algorithms, data and distance. Just as in the first industrial revolution arms were replaced, today we are in danger of replacing minds. AI is the steam engine of our time: it does not generate mechanical energy, but cognitive. And, like every technological revolution, it quietly creeps in where man retreats - in thinking, in relationships, in responsibility. Many functions today no longer require physical presence and where presence is lacking, the machine enters; where relationship is lacking, substitutability enters.
We are moving beyond the time of executive automation and entering the era of agent intelligence, in which systems do not merely produce content but are capable of planning, making decisions and managing workflows without human supervision. Some international observers have already declared the 'symbolic Turing test' passed, it is no longer relevant to ask whether AI will surpass us in individual tasks, because in many cases it already does. The crucial question becomes another: will we be able to influence this technology so that it improves human life instead of emptying it? As Mustafa Suleyman wrote in these pages on 15 November 2025, the desirable future is not an omnipotent and uncontrollable intelligence, but a 'humanistic superintelligence', designed to remain aligned, controllable and at the service of people, with transparency and accountability as its founding principles.
This transition takes place in a social context that has already embraced a new idea of work: more flexible, more remote and more individual. But there is a substantial difference between freedom and isolation. We have mistaken comfort for progress. Working alone, from home, in a mode constantly mediated by technology seems like an achievement, but could turn out to be a trap. When the relationship disappears and work is reduced to output, the human being loses authorial memory, sense of meaning and critical exercise. This is demonstrated by an experiment conducted at the MIT Media Lab: those who write using generative systems show significantly lower brain activity in areas related to creativity and attention than those who work without digital assistance, and in some cases do not even remember what they produced a few minutes earlier.
It is the loss of that 'cognitive friction' that accompanies effort, doubt, error and creative slowness: elements from which innovation, depth and identity are born. If effort disappears, we are not accelerating thought, we are thinning it.
On the economic and cultural level, there is an equally relevant signal, the growing distance between society and the culture of work. Capitalism is viewed with suspicion, as a system to be tamed or moralised. But business is neither a philanthropic actor nor a neutral entity, it is already regenerative by definition, because it creates value, opportunities, income, research, taxation and competitiveness. Shifting it to an ethical mission risks turning it into an inefficient hybrid; weakening its productive role, on the other hand, undermines the very basis of prosperity. The greatest risk is not capitalism, but the loss of capitalist culture: that which links work, merit, value and responsibility.
