'Once you have a machine think and write for you, you're cooked as a species'

- Dave Eggers is an acclaimed American novelist and screenwriter, best known for works like *A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius* and *The Circle* — a 2013 novel that presciently critiqued surveillance capitalism and Big Tech's power over privacy and democracy. - This Guardian interview appears around Eggers' latest book, which continues his recurring theme: the societal and psychological dangers of handing over human agency (thinking, writing, decision-making) to AI systems. - Eggers refers to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, which can generate fluent text, code, and reasoning. His core point is that using AI to do your thinking or writing for you is a fundamental abdication of what makes humans distinct — and that a species that outsources its cognition will atrophy its own abilities and become helpless. - The title quote ("you're cooked as a species") encapsulates a growing anxiety among writers, educators, and technologists: if AI becomes the default way we produce and consume thought, what happens to originality, accountability, and intellectual development?