Sheila L Macrine

The Embodied Hijack: when Pleistocene minds meet disembodied artificial intelligence.

Frontiers in Psychology August 10, 2026 Sheila L Macrine

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into everyday life has intensified a long-standing feature of human cognition: the attribution of agency, intention, and understanding to nonhuman systems. People describe language models, virtual assistants, and autonomous technologies as if these systems know, decide, want, or understand, and they continue to do so even when they know the...