Opening My Cabinet of Mind Changers

Why I Can't Stop Thinking About Our Inner Transformation

I've gotten pushback from readers of Mind Revolution, some accusing me of being red-pilled by the AI-industrial complex. AI is just one more technology, they argue. It is powerful, yes, but hardly on course to radically transform human consciousness.

I understand this reaction. I'm equally weary of our culture of continuous hype. As a sociologist with a specialty in social change, I find the much overused word "revolution" especially egregious. But despite my distaste for the word, I can find no better term for what AI and other innovations are bringing to our minds.

Time will tell if I'm a prophet or a crank. As I explain in "Steve Jobs Got the iPhone Wrong (And We're Getting AI Wrong Too)," I want people to be wary of all predictions, including mine. But while we wait for the future to show itself, think of this as me opening up my personal "mind changers" cabinet for you, revealing a list of twenty-five transformative breakthroughs that, working together, are already beginning to redesign our deepest experiences of being alive.

I've arranged these innovations into four categories, describing mind changers that alter our experiences of 1) self, 2) others, 3) reality, and 4) bodies. Like AI, many of these innovations will transform more than one area of our experience, but I'll separate them here for ease of reading.

Judge for yourself whether this cabinet of mind changers adds up to revolution or hype.

AI Is Reformulating Our Sense of Self

One day you may wake up to find your AI assistant has already answered your emails and texts, adjusted your mood, arranged your exercise regimen and workflow, and stored your dreams for review. Who, then, is the agent initiating the day's activities, you or your AI-mediated extension?

Multiple technologies are redesigning our identities, transforming our sense of being one continuous self.

• Digital personas are creating electronic clones that let us exist in multiple places at once.

• Memory extenders, through brain implants and other devices, may record every experience for perfect recall. We may never misplace our keys or any memory, ever again.

• Cognitive assistants are poised to make decisions faster than human thought. Will they be predicting or creating our choices?

• Emotion regulators could adjust feelings up and down like volume knobs, dialing down grief or cranking up confidence when we request. Imagine modulating your mood like a precise instrument.

• Deep-brain stimulators may modify personalities and mood states.

• Synesthesia inductors could blend our senses so we taste colors, see music, and touch odors. Artists have dreamed of this for centuries—now it's becoming possible.

• Dream controllers may offer AI-curated sleep experiences for therapy or escape.

• Reputation platforms are starting to track, score, and shape how others perceive us across digital spaces. Our digital reflections will have a life of their own, constantly being rated and refined.

• Telepresence robots could extend our physical presence across the globe in real time. Finally, you really can be in two places at once, no magic required, just robots.

Together, these tools will change our experience of being a person.

Some people will welcome having a helper that handles their decision-making. Many may find freedom in a robot twin doing their work while they live elsewhere. I get the appeal. Knowing an avatar will learn and love beyond our death could soften our fear of death. Maintaining precise emotional control in all situations might seem a blessing to many. Hours of curated synesthesia or dream play could become a top pastime. Neurochemical profiles could be adjusted to smooth anxiety or boost charisma.

These new versions of self may provide better lives, or not. But one thing is sure: living with these tools will make being a person very different from what it is today. And that difference is accelerating faster than our ability to understand it.

AI Is Redefining How We Connect with Others

Your mother died last year, but her voice texts you in the morning. "You've got this," she says, just like always. It feels comforting, even though you know she's gone.

It's not just our personal selves getting a makeover; our relationships are next on the list, thanks to a slew of innovations replacing unmediated human connection.

• Humanoid robots will give us lifelike machines as co-workers, companions, caregivers, and romantic partners. We're already seeing people want to marry their chatbots. What happens when these bots have bodies?

• Grief tech creates AI replicas of the dead, trained on their texts, videos, and voices.

• Empathy guides read facial expressions and voice tones better than humans.

• Interpersonal brain links use neural interfaces to let people communicate mind to mind over distance. The ultimate intimacy, or the end of privacy?

• Collective brain links join groups of humans and AIs to solve problems, create, and share thoughts as one. The concept of collective thought is shifting from metaphor to reality.

• Social-AI intermediaries manage relationships, filter interactions, and curate social feeds.

Soon, unmediated human connection may feel awkward and seen as a remnant from a distant past. Like writing letters by hand or showing up at someone's door without a warning text.

The transition is well underway. Millions already prefer robot companions and digital doctors. No judgment, no unpredictability, no human messiness. Embedded electronic empathy guides seem likely to soon be available to enhance most face-to-face talks.

Many will leap at the chance to link their minds to friends, experts, or even a global brain, perhaps treating this large collective mind like a new deity. We will be All One, just through 5G and Ethernet cables. Telepresence avatars might replace travel. Social-AI intermediaries will smooth even the most difficult conversations. No more awkward Thanksgiving dinners or traumatic breakup discussions.

Yet once we stop talking and touching like humans always have, what will it mean to be human? No one now can know the answer.

AI Is Changing How We Experience the Physical World

Your haptic suit tightens as a symphony swells around you. A figure appears and pulls you into an embrace. The music vibrates through your bones. You begin to cry, overwhelmed by something that feels as much like memory as sound.

What happens when the very world around us is no longer quite "natural"? A host of technologies are busy redesigning how we perceive everything external.

• AR/VR/MR layers immersive representations of historical, fictional, and fantasy worlds into physical space. Your morning jog could be through your childhood neighborhood, or ancient Rome, Middle Earth, or Mars. Our environments may be infinitely customizable.

• Sensory upgrades will grant us superhuman sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. Evolution spent millions of years on our senses; we'll redesign them in the next few decades.

• Haptic suits simulate realistic touch with people alive and dead, and with animals and even imaginary beings. You can hug your ancestors, pet dragons, feel that air rush by as you skydive to Earth from outer space.

• Designer psychedelics are unlocking precise, engineered mental states on demand. No more supply from "friends of friends"; now it's pharmaceutically guaranteed ecstasy.

Together, these innovations might make the physical world as malleable as a video game. Press pause, change the settings, and respawn if you don't like the outcome.

Children seem likely to grow up using sensory enhancements like today's electronic toys, then carry those upgrades into work and play. Haptics will transform how we feel nature and human touch. "Real" touch could feel disappointing after the perfectly calibrated digital version. Designer drugs could become daily supplements, with immediate, profound effects. AI-shaped worlds will shift around us seamlessly, blurring all the edges. We're building a world where "Is this real?" becomes an irrelevant question.

Our species seems poised to live in a new type of environment, weaving old and new senses into a different way of being. And unlike our ancestors, who adapted to their environment over millennia, we're doing it within most of our lifetimes.

AI Is Redesigning Our Biology

Your child's genes were edited for faster reflexes. Your own mood is regulated by a designer microbe. Your body, like your phone, updates overnight.

New technologies are also busy giving a massive makeover to the very bodies evolution so carefully designed.

• Gene editing will allow us to alter embryos, children, or adults to boost intelligence, health, appearance, or resilience. The blueprint of life itself is becoming editable. The conversation is shifting from "should we?" to "which traits first?"

• Microbiome tuning could adjust gut bacteria (our second brain) to shift our mood, cognition, health, and behavior.

• Nanomedicine may give us swarms of nanorobots circulating within, targeting drug delivery, cellular repair, and immune system augmentation. Your bloodstream will become a superhighway for microscopic maintenance crews.

• Exoskeletons and physical augmentations add strength, stamina, and agility, expanding what our bodies can do. Everyone may soon choose their physical capabilities.

• Synthetic biology provides lab-grown tissues, organs, wombs, embryos, and cells. We're becoming a species that can print its own spare parts.

• Wearable and implantable sensors monitor physiology and intervene before illness strikes or to enhance our health. Your body becomes a data stream, constantly updated like an app on your phone.

Together, these innovations will dissolve the idea of "a fixed human nature." Our bodies will join the growing list of editable systems open to change. First we edited our photos, then our genes.

Many are already planning to tweak their own or their children's genes for better looks or smarter brains. Parents who used to agonize over preschool choices will soon be deciding their child's genetic endowments. Others will let nanobots fight off disease and aging. Mood-boosting microbes and strength-boosting suits could become as routine (but much more effective) as taking vitamins. Bioprinted organs might become common lifesavers and enhancers as organ waiting lists are replaced by a 3D print queue.

Our new bodies might elevate the human experience, or they could leave us feeling more machine than human. And once we start optimizing, where exactly can we decide to stop?

We Must Prepare

I would like to hear from people who can read this list and not be convinced that a revolution in consciousness is practically inevitable. And even this long list is incomplete. In my research I've no doubt overlooked some innovations, and yet more new ones will appear. Not all will work as powerfully as their creators hope, but many will, and some will vastly exceed current expectations.

I created Mind Revolution to ring an alarm bell, to broaden the conversation about AI’s effects from externalities to include our inner lives as well.

I want you to know that having this idée fixe embarrasses me. It suggests I've become a bit of a crank. But I'm ready to own it: I'm obsessed with the conviction that humans are about to be overwhelmed by an avalanche of mind changers for which we are mightily unprepared.

We may use our new tools to carry our species to a beneficent transcendence or to lasting misery. The challenge goes beyond what we may gain or lose to what, as a species, we may become.

NOTE: Let me know in the comments which of these twenty-five mind changers troubles you most. And which most excites you. And doubters: Tell me why this list is not persuasive. What do you think I do not understand?