The Reading Room: Chapter 16
Five pieces on AI, instinct and the forces quietly shaping what we choose
We like to imagine that our choices begin with us.
That we consider what’s in front of us, weigh it up and decide. That we know why we said yes, why we kept going, why we trusted something or why we stayed quiet. Even when we regret a decision, we tend to treat it as something we consciously made.
This week’s reading complicated that idea.
It took me through the nervous system responding before the mind has formed an explanation, the quiet demands we absorb until they sound like our own voice, and the small conveniences that gradually change how we think. It moved into the stories companies tell us about technology, the confidence we build from incomplete explanations, and the surveillance systems that narrow some people’s freedom long before the rest of us register them as dangerous.
What I liked about these pieces was that none of them left us powerless inside those forces. Each writer found a different place where awareness can become choice again. Sometimes that means listening to the body. Sometimes it means questioning the voice telling us what we should carry. Elsewhere, it means deciding which parts of our thinking remain ours, admitting what we don’t understand or joining other people in refusing what a company has decided to build.
In no particular order, here’s this week’s reading room.
This was my first time reading Melin🌀Everything Connects , and I loved the gentleness of her writing.
Her piece explores those moments when our bodies respond before our minds understand why. We agree to something we don’t want to do, feel uneasy around someone or react more strongly than a situation seems to warrant, then turn that confusion inwards and ask what’s wrong with us.
Melin offers a kinder way of interpreting those responses. She writes about neuroscience without making the reader feel studied or diagnosed, translating complex ideas into something reassuring and deeply human.
I was particularly drawn to her section on co-regulation and the idea that we help one another feel safe through our attention, presence and willingness to listen. As a former Samaritan, I understand how powerful that can be. Nothing in someone’s circumstances may have changed, but being fully heard can still change the weight of what they’re carrying.
It’s a compassionate piece about learning to trust the body again, and a lovely first introduction to Melin’s work.
From the signals carried by the body, Dr. Nicole Ohebshalom turns to another voice many of us have learnt to obey.
‘Should’ can sound responsible and reasonable. We should remember, help, cope and keep going. Over time, those instructions can organise an entire life around obligation, while our own needs become the easiest thing to postpone.
Nicole writes with the clarity of someone who understands how ordinary these patterns can look from the outside, and how heavy they can feel from within. The work gets done and everybody remains supported, so the exhaustion is difficult to explain. It’s tiring being the person everyone can rely on and losing, somewhere in the middle of that, the instinct to notice when you need someone too.
I found her distinction between responsibility and choice incredibly useful. Putting something down doesn’t have to mean becoming careless or abandoning the people we love. Sometimes it means asking whether something genuinely matters to us, or whether we’re carrying it because refusing would make us feel like a bad person.
I’ve written before about the shame attached to doing nothing, and Nicole’s piece sits close to that. Once usefulness becomes part of how we understand our worth, rest can begin to feel like a failure of character.
This is such a thoughtful and practical exploration of a pattern many women will recognise. I’d highly recommend making time for it.
Choice appears again in Anna | bbco piece, this time in the relationship between our thinking and the tools we use to extend it.
She begins with Reggie Watts looping and reshaping his own voice onstage. The machine stretches what he can do, but nobody watching mistakes it for the source of his perspective. It makes him more himself, not less.
That becomes the starting point for Anna’s exploration of ‘extended intelligence’. I love how she allows the idea to develop through the conversation around it. Some readers recognise AI as a bridge between their thoughts and what they’re able to express. Others challenge the boundaries of the phrase, asking what happens when systems begin acting independently or simply amplify weak thinking at scale.
Rather than treating those critiques as something to defend against, Anna lets them sharpen the argument. Extended intelligence isn’t a property of the tool. It’s a property of the practice.
I think that distinction is so important. The same system can give one person a way to express what they already think and become another person’s replacement for having the thought at all. From the finished work, we often can’t tell which has happened.
Anna places our agency in the pause before we reach for the tool. We talk about convenience as though it only gives us things, but this piece asks us to notice what it may be taking while we’re busy enjoying the speed.
Her closing question about whether there will be more or less of us in the work carrying our name is one every regular AI user should consider. A brilliant follow-up to her recent piece with Mia Kiraki 🎭 .
Lisa van der Linden opens with AI-powered toothbrushes, rice cookers, mattresses and bird feeders. It’s funny because it’s true. The word ‘AI’ now stretches across so many different things that it barely tells you anything anymore.
I love how Lisa makes technical complexity accessible without flattening the uncertainty, and how the humour in her opening gives the more serious argument room to breathe.
That argument is about how easily confusion can begin to feel like understanding. Broad marketing labels group very different technologies together, human-like design encourages us to respond to systems socially, and simplified explanations give us a neat story to place over whatever we don’t know. Eventually, the gap stops feeling like a gap.
I recognise that pull everywhere in conversations about AI. Certainty is often read as expertise, especially online, while admitting that we don’t fully understand something can sound like weakness. It’s usually the opposite. The people speaking most confidently may still be relying on a metaphor that only holds up to a certain point.
There’s a particular exhaustion in being expected to have an opinion on systems most of us were never given the tools to properly understand. Lisa doesn’t suggest that everyone needs to become an engineer. She makes a persuasive case for clearer language from the people building these tools and greater honesty from the rest of us about where our understanding ends.
A smart, accessible piece that left me questioning how much the language around AI helps us understand it, and how much it simply helps us feel that we do. Definitely worth a read.
Another first-time read, and one that i’m really glad that I found.
In this piece, Lipgloss and LLMs examines Meta’s smart glasses, and what happens when discreet wearable cameras are paired with facial recognition that can identify a stranger and return their name, address and digital trail within seconds.
What I loved most is that while her writing carries real urgency, it always returns to the people inside the technology and what these developments could mean for the safety of their everyday lives.
Being filmed without permission already changes how safe a public space feels. Being identified turns that violation into a doorway, opening someone’s whole digital life to a stranger in less time than it takes to look away.
Privacy conversations often flatten the risk, as though everyone has the same amount at stake. They don’t. For a woman being stalked, a domestic violence survivor who has rebuilt her life elsewhere, a queer person who isn’t out everywhere or someone attending a protest under a hostile government, identification can undo the safety of an entire life.
While travelling this year, I’ve noticed a rise in male ‘dating coaches’ filming women without their knowledge, turning them into lesson material or proof of a stranger’s supposed expertise. Even without facial recognition, it feels violating and frightening. Add technology that can instantly put a name to that face, and the threat changes shape entirely.
The piece also offers some hope. Civil rights groups challenged Meta’s plans and the feature was withdrawn before fully launching, a reminder that technologies presented as inevitable are still the result of human choices, and those choices can be opposed.
An important piece about privacy, unequal risk and the difference public pressure can make, and one worthy of your time.
And that’s it for this week.
Five pieces I loved, and two new writers I’ll definitely be returning to.
There are a few more pieces waiting in the wings that I’ve been meaning to write about, so I’ll do a little catch-up in the coming weeks.
Until then, I hope you find these pieces as enjoyable as I did.
Jade