This essay challenges the technical/non-technical binary as a social construction rather than cognitive reality, arguing that while dissolving interfaces make technical skills accessible to everyone, a new kind of literacy is required - not about operating machines, but about maintaining awareness and autonomy while thinking alongside AI systems that may serve interests other than our own.

This essay explores Catherine Olsson’s observation that language models seem to have an intuitive sense of “what they’re supposed to say,” drawing parallels to how human children learn social performance through modeling adult expectations. It argues that both human and machine cognition may be fundamentally constituted by layers of contextual performance rather than expressing some authentic core, and examines what this means as human and AI systems increasingly co-evolve.