We tend to think that every major technology changes what we can do.

This book begins with a different possibility. Perhaps every major technology also changes what we no longer need to become.

From maps and writing to calculators, search engines, and artificial intelligence, every tool has relieved us of some intellectual burden. Most of those changes have made life richer, safer, and more productive. Yet every act of delegation carries a quieter consequence. When a task disappears, the kind of person that task once helped form may begin to disappear with it.

The Great Surrender is not a book about whether artificial intelligence is good or bad. It is an exploration of a much older question: what happens to human beings when thinking itself gradually becomes optional.

Moving through philosophy, history, language, education, and technology, Jes