‘Pluribus,’ Psychedelics, and AI: Is Individuality Disappearing?
Psychedelics dissolve selfhood temporarily; AI may erase it permanently by standardizing thought. Unlike rituals or mysticism, which value reintegration, AI risks homogenizing minds.
Psychology TodayHamid Zand Ph.D.

I came across a particularly thought-provoking piece that explores a provocative idea: that AI, much like psychedelics or Buddhist meditation, may erode individualism. Unlike those practices, it could do so quietly and permanently.

Psychedelic experiences and contemplative traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism explicitly emphasize return and reintegration. Compassion, service, and re-entry into society are not optional side effects; they are the point. A loss of self without a way back is not liberation, it is destabilization. This is why even Timothy Leary eventually revised “Turn on, tune in, drop out” to the more sober “drop in.”

The article suggests that AI represents something fundamentally new: not the dramatic dissolution of the ego, but its gradual smoothing. Not replacement, but erosion. The danger is not that AI takes your place, but that it quietly rounds off the edges that make you you.

That is a genuinely unsettling thought. A sense of individuality, of meaning, effort, authorship, and accomplishment, is not a luxury. It is central to psychological health. To outsource those functions wholesale is to risk a life that is efficient, comfortable… and hollow. In the extreme, it also opens the door to external control over what we value, pursue, and even believe.

The Apple TV+ series Pluribus explores these questions with rare elegance. Its vision of enforced harmony through the dissolution of individuality is not dystopian spectacle, it is a cautionary thought experiment. The article’s repeated references to the show are well-earned.

I speak here not only theoretically, but personally. Psychedelics can be profoundly healing. They can also be profoundly disorienting when integration fails. Long breaks matter. Guidance matters. The same is true of meditation: without structure and grounding, insight can curdle into confusion.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: do we need breaks from AI to remain whole? I don’t yet know the answer.

I do know this: unguided, frictionless use of AI is not neutral, and learning how to use these tools without losing ourselves may be one of the defining literacy challenges of our time.