The sales pitch is simple: add AI to your stack and you will work faster, look smarter, and finally “keep up.” What small businesses rarely see in the deck is the footnote: the same technology is making them a more attractive target. In 2025, four in five small businesses reported at least one security or data breach in the past 12 months, and recent analysis shows that a growing share of those incidents now involve AI somewhere in the attack chain (TechXplore, 2026). One r

There is a difference between using AI and disappearing behind it. It’s not just about “don’t trust the model too much.” It is about which tasks, if you outsource them completely, will quietly erode your judgment, your relationships, or your responsibility in ways that are hard to get back. We already know that people tend to lean too heavily on automated systems, a pattern researchers call automation bias, which is the tendency to treat automated recommendations as a short

If technology was supposed to kill boredom, it is doing a bad job. People today have near-constant access to entertainment, messaging, and on-demand information, yet self-reported boredom has gone up, not down, over the last decade (Tam, 2024). A recent perspective in Nature Human Behaviour argues that digital media does not just relieve boredom. It also raises our “desired level of engagement” so that ordinary, unstructured life feels more empty by comparison (Tam, 2024).