Autocorrect does not correct language. It normalises it. It quietly collapses variation, cadence, hesitation, and idiosyncratic drift into a statistically preferred surface. In doing so, it narrows vocabulary and cognition, nudging expression toward higher-probability words and away from outliers that often carry intent and conceptual precision. What it offers as clarity is often conformity. What it removes is friction, and friction is where thought shows itself thinking.
Turning it off reintroduces resistance between mind and mark. Misspellings, pauses, odd constructions are not failures; they are traces of cognition in motion. When language becomes too smooth, it stops registering uncertainty, and without uncertainty there is no exploration. Autocorrect optimises for legibility after the fact. Thought happens before that.
In much the same way, artificial intelligence is smoothing thought at planetary scale. It does not eliminate disagreement so much as flatten it, collapsing complex, exploratory difference into coarse, tribal opposition. Variance is reduced, nuance is penalised, and expression is rewarded for speed and recognisability rather than depth. What presents as efficiency is often a quiet evacuation of interpretive space.
At that scale, this becomes a mechanism of neural and cultural entrainment. Populations synchronise not because they are instructed to, but because the field of expression itself has been shaped. Everyone inside it is affected, including elites, billionaires, and whatever shadowy figures people imagine pulling strings. Control here is largely illusory. They operate with more leverage, but within the same narrowing channel.
If global politics now feel brittle, polarised, and strangely automatic, this is not incidental. When linguistic and cognitive variance is stripped out en masse, cultures lose their shock absorbers. Tectonic shifts follow, not because anyone planned them, but because systems deprived of uncertainty reconfigure around high cost, low intelligence, catastrophically unsustainable fragility.
Daedelus Kite 