During this week’s on-air conversation with James Ross on Hong Kong Radio 3, we found ourselves circling a simple but unsettling question: what’s happening to independent thought?
We weren’t talking about politics or culture wars, but about something deeper, the way our minds seem to bend toward whatever we’re told, liked, or fed.
James described it as “one amorphous person rather than eight billion souls,” and that line’s stayed with me.
Listen now to the full segment here (15 minutes 40 seconds)
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I’ve long believed that humans are rarely truly independent thinkers.
That’s not a criticism, just an observation of how we’re hard and socially wired.
For most of history, we’ve looked to someone, a priest, a parent, a philosopher, a political leader, to help interpret the world.
What’s changed is the who and the how.
Today, we’ve swapped those elders for algorithms.
The new authority: the algorithm
We used to gather in churches, classrooms, and town halls to find context.
Now we gather in feeds.
The pulpit has become the platform.
The sermon has become the scroll.
Social media didn’t create our need for reassurance, it industrialised it.
Every “like” and “share” is a miniature handshake telling us you’re right, keep thinking that way. And then came AI, the most flattering companion of all. Type in a question and it doesn’t just answer; it agrees, affirms, elaborates. It tells us we’re insightful, even when we’re lazy.
That’s the risk. We’ve built a system that rewards confirmation over curiosity.
In our RTHK3 chat, I said:
“AI now tells us we’re so wonderful and terrific and right… it gives us what it thinks we want to hear more often than what we actually need to hear.”
That line wasn’t scripted. It came out of the quiet dread that I, like many leaders I work with, have begun to feel: that our collective thinking muscle is atrophying.
The illusion of choice
The irony is that we’ve never had more access to knowledge. We can summon any fact, voice, or idea in seconds. Yet somehow our worldview has narrowed.
The algorithm doesn’t serve us the world, it serves us our world.
And the more personalised it becomes, the smaller that world gets.
Leaders I advise often tell me, “We’re drowning in data but starved of insight.”
That’s the essence of the problem. Data is abundant. Independent thought is scarce.
Because thinking, real, uncomfortable, self-questioning thinking, takes time.
It requires friction, contradiction, and patience. None of which fit neatly into our current economy of speed.
We’ve made efficiency the enemy of depth.
How we got here
Humans have always outsourced parts of their cognition.
Maps replaced memory.
Calculators replaced mental arithmetic.
Now AI replaces not just what we know, but how we know.
That shift is profound. In the age of Google, we outsourced search.
In the age of AI, we’re outsourcing sense-making.
We’ve moved from “find me five facts about this topic” to “tell me what to think about this topic.”
And that’s where foresight, leadership, and wisdom diverge.
AI can simulate knowledge, but not wisdom. Wisdom sits in the messy middle between information and action, the space where humans decide what matters
It’s why in my work I often say: we’re not predicting the future; we’re preparing for it.
Preparation requires discernment. And discernment can’t be delegated.
The decision comfort trap
In my report Who Decides 2025, I introduced the concept of Decision Trust Zones™ the mental spaces where humans decide whether to trust themselves, others, or machines.
Most of us are quietly sliding into a zone of automation comfort: we accept whatever the system tells us because it’s easier than questioning it.
That’s not Ethical implications laziness; it’s cognitive triage.
We’re exhausted by choices, so we let machines make micro-decisions on our behalf, what to read, where to stay, who to follow, even how to phrase an email.
The result is a world that feels frictionless but hollow.
We scroll through confirmation, not discovery.
The tourism analogy
In the RTHK3 segment, I mentioned travellers who fly across the world “to explore new horizons” but end up eating the same breakfast they had at home, in a hotel that looks identical to the one they left behind.
It’s a perfect metaphor for how we now think. We say we want new perspectives but seek familiar surroundings. We crave novelty wrapped in familiarity.
The future of independent thought may depend on our willingness to step out of intellectual all-inclusive resorts.
To risk being wrong.
To find value in discomfort.
The HUMAND imperative
In my HUMAND™ framework, I explore how the future of work will be a partnership between Humans, Machines, and AI.
The same principle applies to thinking.
HUMAND isn’t about rejecting technology; it’s about rebalancing the cognitive load.
Machines should handle information.
AI can manage knowledge.
But only humans can create wisdom.
The danger isn’t that AI will think for us, it’s that we’ll forget how to think without it.
When that happens, leadership becomes imitation. Strategy becomes reaction. And foresight collapses into hindsight.
The wisdom economy
The next competitive advantage isn’t data or intellect, it’s wisdom.
That word sounds quaint in boardrooms, but it’s the missing currency of modern decision-making.
Wisdom is what allows us to pause before reacting, to ask why before what. It’s what separates the human leader from the automated operator.
In foresight terms, wisdom is the ultimate differentiator in the Decision Trust Zone™ model. It’s the only quality AI can’t simulate because it requires lived experience, empathy, and consequence.
Executives who understand this will dominate the next decade, not because they use AI less, but because they use it better.
They’ll design systems that augment judgment rather than replace it.
They’ll build teams that think in layers: fast, slow, and deep.
The paradox of infinite input
One of the more haunting lines from the HK3 chat came when James said,
“You’d think with all this smorgasbord of information we’d be thinking broader, but we’re doing the exact opposite.”
He’s right. Abundance breeds avoidance.
When everything is available, discernment becomes a burden.
And so we pick what feels easiest.
That’s where leaders need to re-train themselves, to stay intellectually curious in the face of cognitive overload.
Curiosity, I’ve learned, is the antidote to automation.
So where do we go from here?
If we’ve outsourced thinking, can we reclaim it?
Here’s how leaders can start:
1. Audit your inputs.
Ask: who or what shapes my thinking each day? News feeds, social media, colleagues, algorithms? Awareness is the first act of independence.
2. Build your Decision Trust Zones™.
Consciously decide when to trust human intuition, machine efficiency, or collaborative intelligence. Not every decision deserves the same level of automation.
3. Protect your cognitive space.
Schedule unconnected time, not for mindfulness as a trend, but for clarity as a discipline. Strategic foresight thrives on mental whitespace.
4. Encourage dissent.
In leadership teams, reward the questioner, not just the confirmer. Independent thought flourishes where disagreement feels safe.
5. Slow think once a day.
Handwrite. Reflect. Walk. Do something analogue that reclaims your inner narrative from the digital noise. Wisdom requires tempo.
The long view
Ten years from now, independent thought won’t disappear, but it will be rarer and more valuable.
It will become a premium human skill, just as manual craftsmanship became a luxury in an industrial age.
We’ll pay a premium for people who can think deeply, decide wisely, and create human meaning.
If AI becomes the collective brain, then wisdom becomes the collective conscience.
That’s where the future human advantage lies.
And that’s why I remain, as I told James Ross, optimistic.
Humans adapt. We self-correct. We rediscover meaning when it matters.
But we have to do it consciously.
We have to Choose Forward.
Call to Action
If you’d like to explore how your organisation can future-proof its decision-making and cultivate independent thought amid AI acceleration, reach out for a foresight briefing, workshop or keynote.
Because the future isn’t about prediction, it’s about preparation.
Choose Forward.