The Pinocchio Effect: AI and the Risk of Diminished Human-Self Perceptions of Agency-i

Digital technologies come with the risk of psychological harms, though these may be hard to quantify and measure. This does not mean they are unimportant. Psychological harms arising from digital technologies may be so fundamental as to have multiple downstream consequences, each with significant material impact. To illustrate this point, I discuss a novel hypothesis about possible psychological harm arising merely from an increased human understanding of the competencies and functioning of Artificial Intelligence technologies.