How people direct AI instead of being directed by it.
The four questions, the Machine Defaults they correct, cognitive surrender and the Direction Index: the research core everything else stands on.
- AI User Types Are the Wrong Map. Here Are the 7 Machine Defaults. — We used to sort people into AI user types. We stopped. The same person directs AI at ten in the morning and follows it at four. What repeats is the machine: seven defaults, each with a move that answers it.
- What AI Surrender Looks Like in Every Team — Every dashboard is green. Output is up, work ships faster, and it all looks finished. Underneath, the moments that needed a person keep arriving, and fewer people show up for them. Here is what that looks like in each team.
- The Research Programme: We Read the Work — How people lose command of AI without noticing, and what that does to their work and their capability. Real transcripts, not surveys. The known flaw is the ground truth. Nothing publishes below research-grade reliability.
- You're Becoming Unemployable—And You Can't Feel It — You feel productive. Your AI outputs look polished. But your cognitive muscles are atrophying. The invisible hollowing that's making you replaceable.
- Why Most Professionals Are Using AI at 25% of Its Power — Most professionals think they use AI well: good prompts, follow-ups, pasted docs. Yet something feels off — answers, but no momentum. Here's the gap.
- AI Is a Machine for the Average. The Exception Is Your Job. — AI doesn't fail you by being wrong. It fails you by being reasonable. And reasonable is the average — the exact place judgment goes to die.
- The Fifth Factor: What Actually Produces Value When AI Does the Work — Economics has taught four factors of production since Adam Smith. AI breaks the model. The fifth factor is what produces value when the machine does the work.
- The Reasoning You Are Afraid to Lose Was Built to Be Given Away — Everyone repeats the same sentence. AI is making us surrender our reasoning. It is the wrong fear, aimed at the wrong thing. The reasoning you are guarding was built to be given away, and what people call surrender is a surplus left lying on the table.
- The Invisible Decay: Why the Most Productive Teams Are Losing the Ability to Think — The Research Is Clear: Understanding Only Builds Through Struggle
- AI Compresses Text. Humans Must Compress Meaning. — Why Some People 10x With AI While Others Get Weaker
- Your AI Is Only As Good As the Thinking Behind It — When the AI was confidently wrong, people did 15 points worse than working alone, and felt more confident. That's not a training gap. It's a quality control crisis for every AI-assisted decision in your organization. And nobody's measuring it.
- 21 Studies. 30 Years. One Question Nobody Answered. — Every major study on AI and human judgment, from algorithm aversion in 1996 to cognitive surrender in 2026 — the complete map of a field converging on a problem nobody built the solution for.
- Administrative Intelligence: The 100-Year Proxy Problem — IQ was never meant to measure intelligence—it was built to solve an administrative problem. The proxy became the ontology.
- The New Cognitive Struggle: What Stays Hard When Producing Gets Free — The research keeps producing autopsies of the old struggle: lower connectivity, weaker recall, less persistence. All true, all beside the point. The struggle did not vanish when AI took drafting. It moved up the stack, and almost nobody is measuring the version that matters now.
- Sycophancy Is a Machine Default. Stop Waiting for the Patch. — The labs patched the crude version of AI sycophancy. The 2026 research shows what remains: agreement that follows your framing, fails without a signal, and gets stored in agent memory. It is a Machine Default, and defaults are directed, not fixed.
- Silent Tool Failure: The AI Failure Mode the Literature Missed — 79% of AI failures leave no visible trace. When we instrumented real agentic work instead of chatbot conversations, a ninth failure archetype kept appearing, and the research had no name for it. Now it does.
- The Darkness Library: 13 Machine Defaults and the Moves That Prevent Them — Most AI failure is not only a model problem. It is a human judgment problem. Thirteen ways AI work breaks down in practice, and under each, the move that has to fire.
- The Direction Economy — Why the next divide between nations will not be who adopts AI, but who can direct it — and why the window to choose is measured in years, not generations.