Did you catch that Fortune piece where a CEO mom and her college-age daughter landed on opposite sides of AI? I read it this weekend. I have thoughts.

A woman named Maria Colacurcio runs a company. About a year ago she went all in on AI — built tools to help her work, learned everything she could, wired it into her day. And it worked. She reckoned she'd gotten about three times more capable. Most of us would take that trade without blinking.

Then one morning she read something one of her AI tools had written in her own voice. Her phrasing, her habits, the little way she trails off mid-sentence. And she sat there trying to figure out which words were hers and which ones the machine had put in her mouth — and she couldn't tell. She couldn't find herself in her own writing.

The problem wasn't that the AI did a bad job. It's that it did such a good job she went missing inside it.

Here's the even more interesting piece. Maria has a daughter, Sofia, who just finished her first year at Dartmouth. And Sofia wrote her own version of this — not about her mom's company, but about what she's watching happen all around her at school.

She'd pictured college the way a lot of us did. Late nights with books, long papers, sitting with a hard idea until it finally cracks open. Instead she showed up just as AI landed everywhere at once — professors rewriting their assignments around it, every student quietly using it, and everyone repeating the same line: it's here, better get on board. What bothered her was that nobody seemed sure what they were getting on board with.

For a class project she interviewed a bunch of her classmates about it. Almost all of them use it. Almost none think it's going away anytime soon. And a lot of them told her the same quiet thing: they'd stop tomorrow if everyone else did. Nobody actually chose this. They're all just in it together, and nobody wants to be the only one who steps out and gets left behind.

It's not that people love it. It's that quitting feels impossible when everyone around you is doing it.

And what scares Sofia isn't that the machine is smart. It's that easy is starting to beat hard, everywhere, all at once. It's easier to have the AI sum up the book than to read it. Easier to let it write the thing than to work out what you actually think. Easier, even, to type your problems into a chatbot at midnight than to call a friend and get into it. Her worry is a plain one: the slow, hard, kind of annoying parts were the parts that were quietly making us into people. Take them all away and you get more done — and a little less of a person doing it.

The reason I’m writing about this today is that I'd been in a room with a kid who said basically the same thing.

Earlier this year I spent a day with some high schoolers from La Quinta, Cat City, Palm Desert and Xavier, through Big Brothers Big Sisters, talking about AI. Sharp kids, honest about using it for homework. But one quieter boy said he was worried about somebody in his life — somebody on ChatGPT all day and night, leaning on it for everything, and he didn't know how to bring it up without it turning into a fight. Someone asked who. He begrudgingly said it was his mom. The room went quiet. He hadn't wanted to say it, either — you could see it cost him. You don't give up your own mom to a room full of strangers unless something's really got you scared.

So look at what we've got. A CEO's daughter at Dartmouth, worried about her mother. A high schooler in the desert, worried about his. Two kids, watching two women they love disappear a little into the thing that's making their lives easier.

For a couple of years now, everybody's been asking the same nervous question about AI. Am I behind? Are my kids behind? Is my business behind? We treat it like a train leaving the station, and the only thing to be scared of is missing it.

But nobody in these stories missed the train. The CEO was three times faster. The boy's mom was on it day and night. Sofia's whole campus is on it. They went all in — and in is exactly where the trouble showed up. Not one of them got hurt by falling behind. They're getting hurt by going so deep they've started losing track of themselves. Most things that are bad for you at least have the decency to feel bad. This one feels like getting your life together.

Which means a lot of us have been scared of the wrong thing. And worried about the wrong person. We've got a hundred ways to say somebody's falling behind. We don't really have one for somebody who's gone too far in.

I myself said something close to this out loud about a year ago, at the first TEDx they ever did here in Rancho Mirage. They let me give a talk on AI. (They stand you on a little red dot, clip a microphone somewhere you can't see, and for a good fifteen minutes you genuinely believe you can see the future.)

I had the whole Terminator theme running on the screen behind me, but the point underneath it was simple: the thing to watch isn't robots taking over. It's regular people handing over their own thinking because it's easier, and not even noticing they did it. I gave it a name that night — unthinking. And I told them the takeover, when it comes, won't come by force. It'll come by invitation. We'll just hand it over ourselves.

I'd love to tell you I saw it all coming. Really I was just saying what a lot of people already felt. A study out of Wharton this year watched people choose the AI's answer even when it was flat wrong; MIT found its own version looking at people's brains; it’s all cognitive surrender. We're now funding studies to find out whether outsourcing our thinking might be bad for our thinking.

Spoiler alert: not great.

But you don't need a study. Those kids already knew it, watching their moms.

Now, you'd think something this powerful would come with a warning label. It doesn't. It feels great. You get faster, you look sharp in the meeting, you speed through the to-do list. By the time anything feels off, you're already in deep and you can't quite remember how you used to do it without the help.

Nobody hands over their own judgment because they're weak. They do it because it works, and because working feels good, and good is hard to argue with.

So we keep calling this a generational thing — the kids, the grown-ups, the digital natives, the boomers. But I don't think age is the line that actually splits these people. I think it's choice.

I'm what you'd call AI-pilled. I figured the kids would be further down this road than me — they generally are. Digital natives, grew up with a phone in their hand, supposed to take to this like everything else. So when I sat with those high schoolers, and then read Sofia in that Fortune piece, I kept waiting for the enthusiasm. It never showed up. If anything, they were the wary ones in the room.

Because it was never about age. It was about who signed up. Agency.

The kids got drafted into this — nobody asked them, same as nobody asked them about the last thing we handed them and called it connection. And that's the part they haven't forgotten. They grew up inside social media. They watched a promise of connection quietly turn into isolation, in real time, on themselves. So when the next miracle rolls in promising to do everything for them, they don't get excited. They flinch. They've seen this movie, and they remember how it ends.

What Sofia was saying — what that boy was saying — is that the hard parts were never the bug. The friction was the point. Reading the thing yourself, writing the email from scratch, sitting in the uncomfortable conversation instead of typing it into a box.

That's the stuff that was quietly making them into people. And they can sense being more human is the first thing on the chopping block.

Here's what I think scares them, though, and it isn't a grade. It's watching the adults they love slowly show up less. The mom who's more ChatGPT than herself lately. The dad, the boss, the guy writing the newsletter. They're not worried the machine will replace them. They're worried it's replacing us — that a little less of you shows up in your own life every time a little more of the machine does. And when you say it like that, it stops being a young thing or an old thing. That's just scary at any age.

Which brings it home, because I'm the guy in that sentence. I'm all in, and I've never made more things in my life — apps, tools, little sites, stuff I code and vibe-code my way through before lunch. I have never been busier. Busy's the word I keep using when I really want to use productive — and I’m finding it doesn't fit much.

Sure, I've never been busier. I've also never been less sure how much of it was me.

So no clean ending from me. Just the question, which is yours now too. Forget whether you're behind. Ask the other one: are you still showing up — or is the machine showing up for you? And are you just too busy to notice the difference?

Sat Singh runs AICV and SunshineFM from Rancho Mirage. He gave a TEDx talk last summer warning people not to hand their thinking over to a machine, then went home and kept handing his over. No fate but the one you make.

If this resonates, pass it along — especially to anyone who's gotten a little too giddy about how much busier AI's made them.

Don't forget: Saturday Morning AI Workshop is July 18 (reach out for a promo code if you need one). And we finally got word from the City of Palm Desert to host an AI event in November — if you've got ideas, send them my way.