Tech Policy Press - The Battle for Cognitive Liberty in the Age of Corporate AI
CJL director Courtney Radsch argues that today’s AI systems—shaped by market concentration, surveillance-based business models, and weak regulation—are evolving into an infrastructure of cognitive control that threatens freedom of thought, human agency, and democracy unless firm legal, structural, and human-rights–based constraints are imposed.
Scroll through a dating app and you’ll find an AI ‘wingman’ preloading conversation starters and advising you who would be worth talking to in person. Try to write an email and your AI bot completes the sentence for you. If you hesitate, it offers to do the rest. It feels helpful, until it doesn’t.
AI companies are promising us mind clones, AI agents, and digital twins. OpenAI wants everyone to have a personalized AI assistant that records “every conversation you’ve ever had in your life, every book you’ve ever read, every email you’ve ever read, everything you’ve ever looked at,” as the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, put it. Chatbots, AI therapists, and companions encourage people to pour their most personal confessions into AI systems – things you’d only ever write in a diary and wouldn’t dare share online. Brain-reading wearables and implants are coming on to the market to translate our thoughts into words, images, or behavior.
The story of our transition into the AI age is not just about misbehaving chatbots or eavesdropping assistive tools, it’s a story about how about how a handful of corporations are redesigning the architecture of human thought into a system of cognitive capture, an infrastructure that mediates perception, preference, and even emotion. This transformation is not merely technological but structural: a product of market concentration, surveillance-based business models, and the absence of enforceable rights to freedom of thought. What began as tools to assist us in writing, learning, and connecting have become instruments of persuasion, prediction, and predation. These systems monetize attention, shape emotion, and blur the line between suggestion and control. This essay traces how that happened, why it’s profitable, and what it will take to protect the freedom to think as AI becomes inseparable from daily life.