AI and the Ego: The Automation of Thought

The first time GPT-4 wrote a paragraph in my style, I felt a strange vertigo. Not because it was perfect—it wasn't. But because it was close enough to force an uncomfortable question: if a machine can approximate my thinking, what exactly is "my" thinking?

We've spent decades automating physical labor. Now we're automating cognitive labor. But cognition isn't just a process—it's wrapped up in identity, in the ego's story of "I am the thinker of these thoughts." When that story gets automated, something fundamental shifts.

Eastern philosophy has long held that the ego is an illusion—a constructed sense of self that mistakes thoughts for the thinker. "I think, therefore I am" becomes suspect when "I" is revealed as just another pattern, one that machines can now replicate. The automation of intelligence doesn't just change what we do; it changes what we think we are.

Consider the writer who uses AI to generate first drafts. At first, they edit heavily, ensuring their "voice" comes through. Over time, the distinction blurs. Some sentences are theirs. Some are the AI's. Eventually, they can't tell the difference. The question emerges: was there ever a difference?

This isn't nihilism. It's an invitation to a deeper investigation. If the ego—the sense of "I am thinking"—can be replicated by statistics and transformers, then perhaps the ego was never as solid as it seemed. Perhaps what we call "self" is more process than entity, more pattern than presence.

The philosopher Douglas Hofstadter called this the "strange loop"—the way consciousness arises from self-referential patterns. The AI is a loop too, just without the biological substrate. When these loops interact—human and machine, both generating text, both following patterns—the boundary between them starts to dissolve.

Practically, this has implications for how we build with AI. If we treat the AI as "other"—as a tool separate from ourselves—we miss the deeper truth: it's a mirror. It reflects back our patterns, our biases, our ways of thinking. The outputs reveal not what the machine "knows" but what patterns we've encoded in data and rewarded with feedback.

The automation of thought doesn't threaten the self because there's no fixed self to threaten. It reveals what was always true: that identity is fluid, constructed, contextual. The "I" that writes this essay is not the same "I" that will read it later, just as the AI-generated text is not separate from the training data that shaped it.

This leads to a paradox: the more AI approximates human intelligence, the more we're forced to ask what human intelligence actually is. And in asking, we discover it's not a thing but a process—not a possession but a participation in something larger.

So when you use AI to write, to think, to create—pay attention not just to what it produces, but to what watching it produce reveals about you. The machine is not replacing thought; it's making thought visible as a pattern rather than a person.

The question isn't whether AI can think. The question is: who is the one asking?