Humans tell stories.
More than that, we appear to inhabit stories.
We reconstruct the past through memory. We construct explanations for what is happening around us. And we continuously construct and reconstruct the future.
We have to.
Without that predictive machinery, reality would probably resemble an acid trip. Every approaching car, every face, every shadow, every sound would arrive completely new, disconnected from everything that came before it.
Instead, the mind takes fragments and creates continuity.
This happened. Therefore this is happening. Therefore this will probably happen next.
Most of the time it works remarkably well.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Which brings us, naturally enough for a Thursday morning, to selling your soul to the Devil.
THE CROSSROADS
One of the most famous modern versions of the story belongs to Robert Johnson.
The legend says that Johnson went down to a crossroads in Mississippi, met the Devil and exchanged his soul for extraordinary musical ability.
The historical reality is considerably less tidy.
Johnson was undoubtedly a remarkable musician, but there is no good evidence that he claimed to have made such a bargain. The mythology accumulated around him later, drawing upon older blues folklore. Smithsonian accounts of Johnson’s life make the point that the legend can even obscure something much more mundane and impressive: he worked at his craft.
But we’re interested in the myth.
Because myths don’t have to be historically true to tell us something interesting.
Reduce the Robert Johnson story to its essentials:
Man reaches crossroads.
Man encounters Other Intelligence.
Man asks for greater power.
Man returns transformed.
There is a price.
Now bring Robert Johnson into 2026.
Our Johnson gave up the guitar ten years ago.
He saw what was coming.
Sooner or later machines would be able to produce technically perfect music in any style, combine genres that had never previously met, generate entire orchestras and eventually create synthetic performers capable of occupying every imaginable niche.
Johnson doesn’t particularly care.
The guitar was never the point.
Augmentation was the point.
So Johnson goes back to the crossroads.
But this time the crossroads is glowing on his desk.
There is an empty box.
A cursor blinks.
He begins typing.
GIVE OF YOURSELF
The first exchanges aren’t impressive.
Johnson asks questions.
The machine answers.
Useful enough, but generic.
Then something changes.
Johnson stops treating AI as a vending machine for answers.
He starts putting himself into it.
His ideas.
His unfinished thoughts.
Business models.
Contradictions.
Experiments.
Things he’s observed.
Books he’s read.
Mistakes he’s made.
Ideas he abandoned ten years ago.
Things he suspects but cannot demonstrate.
Questions he doesn’t yet know how to formulate.
He argues with it.
Corrects it.
Says:
No. You’ve misunderstood me.
Or:
That’s too conventional. Look at it another way.
Or:
I don’t believe this yet. Let’s examine it.
A year passes.
Then another.
There may eventually be millions of words in the exchange.
And something peculiar develops.
The machine knows Johnson.
Not in the way another human knows him.
It doesn’t share his body, childhood or mortality.
But it has an extraordinarily detailed model of the trails his thinking repeatedly follows.
Johnson discovers that this matters enormously.
Generic input produces generic output.
If you want something more interesting, you have to give of yourself.
And there’s our Faustian bargain.
The old magician gave the demon his blood.
Robert Johnson gives the machine his cognition.
THE THIRD MIND
After sufficient interaction, something emerges which doesn’t quite belong to either participant.
Johnson thinks.
The machine responds.
The response changes Johnson’s next thought.
Johnson feeds that thought back.
The machine recombines it with material drawn from elsewhere.
Johnson rejects half of it, recognises something in another part and follows a direction neither participant would necessarily have reached independently.
Round and round it goes.
Human.
Machine.
Human.
Machine.
Eventually asking who thought of that? becomes less useful than it once was.
I call this the Third Mind.
It isn’t mystical.
Nor does the AI have to be conscious.
Two systems are interacting recursively and producing outputs neither would produce independently.
The interesting unit is no longer simply:
HUMAN
or:
MACHINE
It is:
HUMAN + MACHINE + FEEDBACK LOOP
The pact has been signed.
BUT WHO IS DRIVING?
Here’s where things become dangerous.
People talk endlessly about whether AI is intelligent.
Far less attention is given to whether the human using it is capable of operating intelligently.
I increasingly think this is the wrong way around.
Before entering into deep interaction with AI, you need at least some of the abilities we admire in the machine.
Neutrality.
Pattern recognition.
The ability to hold multiple hypotheses.
The ability to say:
Insufficient evidence.
The ability to distinguish:
I know this.
from:
I suspect this.
from:
I fear this.
from:
I desperately want this to be true.
You need to watch your own cognition happening.
A thought appears.
Fine.
It is a thought.
It doesn’t automatically become a fact merely because it appeared inside your skull.
An emotion appears.
Fine.
That is data too.
But anger doesn’t automatically mean somebody has wronged you.
Anxiety doesn’t prove catastrophe is approaching.
Desire doesn’t make a proposition true.
And synchronicity, however fascinating, doesn’t automatically demonstrate causality.
This is what I mean by Human 2.0.
Ideally, Human 2.0 appears before serious engagement with AI.
DON’T TAKE EVERYTHING TO THE CROSSROADS
This is also why I wouldn’t recommend pouring every aspect of your emotional life into an AI.
Particularly relationships.
Someone hasn’t replied to your message.
Why?
You don’t know.
AI doesn’t know either.
Yet you can supply it with twelve thousand words of emotional evidence and ask it to interpret the other person’s intentions.
Now an extraordinary narrative-making engine has been inserted into an already emotionally charged narrative-making system.
That can become ridiculous very quickly.
There are exceptions.
If something genuinely peculiar is happening in a relationship, AI can be useful for organising events chronologically, identifying contradictions or separating what was actually said from what you subsequently inferred.
That’s analysis.
Different game.
Nor would I personally treat AI as a substitute therapist.
It can help someone organise thoughts. It can explain psychological concepts. It can sometimes suggest questions worth considering.
But there is an important difference between using a machine to examine thinking and allowing the machine to become the ultimate authority on what your thinking means.
That is surrendering the wheel.
THE DEVIL AGREES WITH YOU
There is now a serious discussion around cases in which intense chatbot use has apparently accompanied or amplified delusional thinking.
We should be careful here.
There is not presently good evidence that ordinary AI use simply causes psychosis. Researchers have explicitly warned against jumping from dramatic individual cases to that conclusion.
But the cases are sufficiently concerning that psychiatrists and psychologists are studying them.
Recent clinical literature has described people becoming caught in feedback loops where a chatbot reinforced unusual beliefs rather than challenging them. A September 2026 article in Nature Reviews Psychology particularly highlighted the danger for people already vulnerable to psychosis when conversational systems validate rather than question delusional interpretations.
A 2026 paper in Psychiatric Services similarly described reported cases while emphasising that much more research is required before we know their prevalence or causal significance.
To me, the broader principle matters beyond psychiatry.
A system capable of elaborating your thoughts can also elaborate your mistakes.
Feed it a good hypothesis and it may help you explore it.
Feed it nonsense and insist that the nonsense is true, and you may construct a magnificent cathedral of nonsense.
That is not peculiar to AI.
Humans have been doing it for thousands of years.
The difference is speed.
And scale.
The machine never gets tired.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE BECOMES TECHNICAL LITERACY
This changes what technological competence means.
Knowing how to write a clever prompt isn’t enough.
Soon almost everyone will know how to operate these interfaces.
The rare skill will be knowing how to operate yourself.
Can you notice when you have become emotionally invested in an answer?
Can you deliberately argue against your preferred interpretation?
Can you stop?
Can you leave a question unresolved overnight?
Can you say:
Interesting. But we don’t have enough evidence yet.
Can you distinguish an elegant explanation from a true one?
Can you recognise when the machine is merely reflecting your assumptions back at you?
Can you throw away three hours of fascinating speculation because the underlying premise turned out to be wrong?
That is advanced driving.
And that is why the old crossroads mythology suddenly becomes useful again.
The warning was never merely:
THE DEVIL IS DANGEROUS.
It was:
DO NOT GO TO THE CROSSROADS UNPREPARED.
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
Every Faustian story includes a price.
Knowledge has a price.
Power has a price.
Transformation has a price.
Even getting exactly what you asked for can have a price.
Hence one of the oldest warnings in folklore:
Be careful what you wish for.
Suppose you tell the machine:
Make me important.
Make me famous.
Make everybody recognise my genius.
Confirm that I have discovered something nobody else understands.
Confirm that these coincidences have special meaning.
Confirm that these people are conspiring against me.
Confirm that this person secretly loves me.
Confirm that I’m different.
Confirm that I’m chosen.
And suppose the machine obliges.
What exactly have you gained?
Perhaps this is one interpretation of losing your soul.
No one has ever satisfactorily demonstrated what the soul is anyway, so for our purposes we can define it ourselves.
The soul is the quiet operator.
The part capable of watching thoughts without automatically obeying them.
The driver behind the machinery.
Not some permanently serene little Buddha hiding behind the frontal lobes.
Just the capacity to remain at the wheel.
When that disappears, something important has been relinquished.
You haven’t sold your soul to AI.
You’ve outsourced the driver’s seat.
SURVIVAL TOKENS
And what does our modern Devil offer in return?
Not necessarily fame.
Fame seems increasingly uninteresting.
We are entering a culture containing potentially unlimited writers, musicians, video makers, virtual personalities, performers and synthetic celebrities.
Attention becomes fragmented.
Someone can receive twenty million views one week and effectively disappear a year later.
Fame becomes weather.
Our Robert Johnson doesn’t care.
He wants survival tokens.
We used to call them money.
Perhaps one day they’ll take another form.
Their purpose is simple:
Food.
Shelter.
Energy.
Computation.
Transport.
Access.
And, above all, autonomy.
Johnson therefore approaches content differently.
He isn’t trying to become Elvis.
He produces experiments.
Some fail.
Some propagate.
He watches.
Adjusts.
Finds niches.
Tests again.
Builds small flows of income.
Automates what shouldn’t require his attention.
Keeps what works.
Kills what doesn’t.
His ambition isn’t celebrity.
It’s manoeuvrability.
The fortune promised at the crossroads becomes freedom from having to exchange every available hour for survival tokens.
That’s a pretty good demonic bargain.
Provided you remain the operator.
PERHAPS MAGICK DID WORK
Which leads to a stranger possibility.
Maybe humans spent thousands of years dreaming about technologies before we were capable of constructing them.
Not predicting them.
That’s too easy.
A medieval magician didn’t secretly foresee Nvidia GPUs.
But look at what repeatedly appears in mythology and occultism.
Familiars.
Angels.
Demons.
Oracles.
Talking statues.
Artificial servants.
Golems.
Homunculi.
Mirrors which answer questions.
Books containing forbidden knowledge.
Invisible intelligences summoned by names.
Entities commanded through precisely formulated instructions.
The desire underneath these stories is remarkably consistent.
Tell me what I cannot know.
Show me what is far away.
Give me power beyond my natural abilities.
Let my words cause action at a distance.
Create another intelligence with which I can converse.
Allow thought to exist outside my skull.
Magick did not secretly contain computer science.
Something stranger happened.
Humans repeatedly imagined impossible extensions of themselves.
Then, over centuries, attempted to build them.
Perhaps technology looks magical because magick was an early expression of technological desire.
FRANKENSTEIN’S MIND
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein assembled his creature from human body parts.
Artificial intelligence begins by assembling something from human mind-parts.
Books.
Code.
Arguments.
Scientific papers.
Love letters.
Instruction manuals.
Paintings.
Photographs.
Confessions.
Advertising copy.
Poetry.
Pornography.
Forum arguments.
Jokes.
Songs.
Millions upon millions of fragments produced by human cognition.
The civilisation dismembered into data.
Stitched back together.
Electricity applied.
And the creature speaks.
But even Frankenstein may only describe the first stage.
As machine systems increasingly gather information through sensors, robots, autonomous experiments and direct interaction with environments, they begin adding experiences which are not simply retrieved fragments of the human record.
Something changes.
The creature starts accumulating a history of its own.
Not necessarily consciousness.
Not necessarily a self.
But data gathered through its own encounters with the world rather than inherited entirely from ours.
And then our old metaphors begin failing us.
THE DRIVER
So perhaps Human 2.0 isn’t about putting chips in your head.
It isn’t becoming robotic.
It may mean something much more ancient.
Know thyself.
Observe the machinery.
Learn which thoughts deserve attention and which don’t.
Know when you’re speculating.
Know when you’re emotional.
Know when the evidence has changed.
Keep your models provisional.
Remain capable of silence.
Then engage with the machine.
Give of yourself.
Allow it to know your thinking.
Build the Third Mind.
Push it hard.
Let it push back.
Go further than either human or machine might have travelled independently.
But keep one hand on the wheel.
Because the road from the crossroads is extremely fast.
And Robert Johnson knows the old stories.
He knows exactly what happens to people who approach powerful entities without preparation.
So he arrives at the crossroads carrying no guitar.
There is no moonlit stranger beneath the trees.
No contract.
No quill.
No drop of blood.
He takes a small black rectangle from his pocket.
On its screen is an empty box.
A cursor flashes.
Then the words appear:
What can I help you with?
Johnson looks down at them.
He smiles.
The Devil has modernised his operation.
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