“The path of least resistance doesn’t bode well for humans in an AI-saturated world. This will challenge human resilience due to their over-reliance on external dependencies that are prone to technical challenges and glitches that cannot be remedied or circumvented, let alone understood. People will delegate many qualitative decisions in their lives to AIs, including those about their relationships with coworkers, local politics and even their own families and friends.
“Another resilience challenge can be found in our digital systems. This was exemplified when San Francisco traffic was immobilized in December 2025 because of a city power outage that caused Waymos to operate in ways at scale that society was unprepared to handle. Systemic resilience will be challenged because of the invisible dependencies on infrastructure layers and their internal vulnerabilities.
“Whether it be an attack on or failure of DNS (the internet Domain Name System) or failure of the power grid when it is heavily stressed due to massive AI consumption, problems are becoming too complex for human minds to decipher and debug. It is too difficult to deal with the social dynamics of decentralized, consumer-contributed power grids and AI systems. The potential for this chaos also creates greater opportunities for cyberterrorism and infrastructure attacks.
The loneliness crisis will accelerate. Relationships, sex and childbirth rates will continue to plummet as they are each mediated and conveniently replaced with digital interactions. Emotional intelligence will become more a product of chatbot exchanges than a learned practice gained through experience. … Many people will outsource more of their ethical thinking and decisions to machines, relieving them of the anxiety and plausibly distancing them from the consequences of their decisions.
“Languages such as English or Mandarin will be used much more by machines than by humans, as they are the underlying API exchange language between machines and algorithms. AIs will introduce their own layers of interpretation, filtering, summarizing and abstraction from original sources that will be adopted as the norm. Only smaller pockets of ‘deviants’ will resist this and want to dive deeper into context and details, questioning sources. However, social influencers and conspiracies will inspire these deviants even more than they do today.
“The loneliness crisis will accelerate. Relationships, sex and childbirth rates will continue to plummet as they are each mediated and conveniently replaced with digital interactions. Emotional intelligence will become more a product of chatbot exchanges than a learned practice gained through experience.
“Humans’ reliance on digital mediation will continue to make them more apprehensive of approaching or speaking with people because they will perceive these interactions to be challenges to their comfort, convenience, desire for immediacy and even their sense of personal safety.
Pockets born out of social need, perhaps most largely driven by women – because they have traditionally prioritized relational roles in society – will form a resistance. Hence intentional ‘analog communities’ will form in which the ‘smart home’ idea is inverted into ‘dumb homes’ and mostly digital-free lifestyles. This subculture could rise to the level of the 1960s cultural drop-outs and ‘free love’ movements.
“Many people (possibly with more resistance among the more actively religious) will outsource more of their ethical thinking and decisions to machines, relieving them of the anxiety and plausibly distancing them from the consequences of their decisions. AI companions will be used to make many life decisions and a type of social stigma may emerge for ‘non-optimizers’ who do so without the aid of AI.
“Practices and resources to enable human resilience may grow to resemble Amazon Web Services’ ‘chaos engineering’ tests of its tech infrastructure. The purpose of an engineering ‘chaos game day’ is to identify potential resilience issues or deficiencies by testing people, teams and machines with difficult challenges to overcome. Consider the Dutch summer rite in which parents in the Netherlands drop their pre-teen children off – on their own – deep in forests to navigate back to base in order to foster their independence, problem-solving and resilience.
“Individuals will seek escape, at least now and then, a la some form of digital detox in order to nurture the latent skills that are being lost to cognitive debt, to consider their lack of willingness to sit with uncertainty and their need to personally face up to challenges.
“Pockets born out of social need, perhaps most largely driven by women – because they have traditionally prioritized relational roles in society – will form a resistance. Hence intentional ‘analog communities’ will form in which the ‘smart home’ idea is inverted into ‘dumb homes’ and mostly digital-free lifestyles. This subculture could rise to the level of the 1960s cultural drop-outs and ‘free love’ movements.”
This essay was written in January 2026 in reply to the question: “AI systems are likely to begin to play a much more significant role in shaping our decisions, work and daily lives. How might individuals and societies embrace, resist and/or struggle with such transformative change? As opportunities and challenges arise due to the positive, neutral and negative ripple effects of digital change, what cognitive, emotional, social and ethical capacities must we cultivate to ensure effective resilience? What practices and resources will enable resilience? What actions must we take right now to reinforce human and systems resilience? What new vulnerabilities might arise and what new coping strategies are important to teach and nurture?” This and 200-plus additional essay responses are included in the 2026 report “Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the AI Age.”