Social media changed society. AI changes everything.

This quantification turned reality itself inside out. Instead of social media reflecting society, society began performing for social media. Public discourse morphed into performance art, optimized for algorithms. It became a different sort of top-down: one in which it's the algorithm in charge.

And so here we are, in a world where users have agreed to pout, pose, play dress-up, and be a number that influences other numbers. It's also a world in which the fake turned reality itself, and the real is perceived as fake. As an aside, by then, I stopped writing a tech trends column; I was so flabbergasted.

It's this scenario that makes way for the more seismic shift: artificial intelligence.

I don't believe AI is an evil character from Black Mirror, but it's just that the systems that handle your life are being designed with AI as their DNA. That AI is going to know you very, very well and will be able to impact how you think.

Where social media demanded your active participation, AI requires an entirely passive surrender. It doesn't need you to create content; it watches how you think, how you react, and what you fear, using those data points to anticipate your next thought before you even finish forming it. It creates for you, acts for you, leaving you to deplete your own cognitive functions.

The real danger for the average citizen is the slow curation of our preferences. Social media manipulated what we looked at; AI is starting to manipulate how we decide. When we rely on smart algorithms to tell us what to reply, what to buy, how to phrase a sensitive message, or how to interpret a complex news story, we stop doing the heavy lifting of evaluation. Memory and critical judgment become outsourced utilities.

By choosing the path of least resistance, we risk trading the messy but necessary friction of independent choice for a state of highly convenient, machine-guided complacency. In other words, we’ll be reclining on the couch while AI does the work.

I already find that my go-to AI assistants are beginning to know me closely, lapping up and filing away information that will help them help me the next time I ask. Without my conscious intent to feed them information, they already know my strengths and vulnerabilities, habits and dislikes, and so much more than many people do. They’re designed to pick up your intent, reaction, history and needs.

This intimacy flips the dynamic entirely. On social media, people became obsessed with external validation—how the digital world perceived their numbers. With AI, the influence moves deeply inward. The system recalibrates our analytical baselines, our taste, and our spontaneous thoughts. We are transitioning from an era where code merely curated our attention to one where it automates our cognition. When we outsource our daily thinking, decision-making, and understanding to an interface, we aren't just changing how we communicate anymore. We are altering how we think.

The great irony of the internet age is looping back on itself. We began this journey two decades ago, genuinely thrilled that a single ordinary individual could bypass the old top-down hierarchies and speak directly to power and even become the power.

If we aren't careful, we will end this digital revolution exactly where we started—except this time, we won't even realize we've been silenced, content to let a machine do the thinking for us while we remain just a number in the background. Find your equation with AI as the revolution moves forward at lightning speed.

The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.

Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.