Split screen from the film: an AI assistant reading heart rate, sleep and recovery offers to postpone a 5 PM meeting, while Daniel Sunde-Hansen sits on a tram

Perspective Aug 19, 2026 AI Human-machine Future of work

The chip in my hand is the least integrated technology I own

The debate about humans and machines opens with implants. That is the part we can see, and the part that matters least.

I have an NFC chip in my hand. It opens my assistant, and it reliably unsettles people at dinner parties. But of everything I touch in a day, it is the technology I am most aware of. I notice it every single time. By the standard the research actually uses, that makes it barely integrated at all.

«When technology becomes part of you» – a short film with Professor Carlos Velasco and me, published by BI Norwegian Business School on LinkedIn. The research behind it: Velasco, Motoki, Petit, Andersen, Alaei & Gustafsson (2026), Psychology & Marketing.

The future I want gives us more choices

I'm a long-term optimist. I believe in the technology the research behind this film explores: systems that become abilities we have, that grant more independence and expand what people are capable of. The research distinguishes between fusion, where technology becomes a bodily extension, and symbiosis, where human and system share the decision space. That is a future worth building.

In the film, Professor Carlos Velasco and I discuss technology that stops being something we use and starts becoming part of us. That is exactly where the value lies. It is also where my short-term concerns begin.

The menu is made before you order

AI already shapes what we see before we choose. It gives you three options and you pick one. The record says the human decided. The system decided what could become an option. Algorithmic curation narrows the selection and shapes the architecture around your choices, and even as "humans in command," we can mistake a menu shaped by AI for our own taste.

Protecting the human's last click means little if no one can examine what happened before the buttons appeared. Autonomy will depend less on our final click than on how the menu was made.

I know the menu because I built the kitchen

I get real value from my AI agents because I have shaped their roles and their context, and because I can challenge their reasoning. I know how the menu was made because I built the kitchen. That is what autonomy looks like in practice: not the freedom to pick a button, but the ability to see how the options came to be and to change them.

That is also where governance has to begin. Who selected the options? Which possibilities were filtered out? Can the framing be seen, challenged, overruled? Does anyone notice when it changes?

Long-term optimist, short-term concerns

The chip in my hand is visible. I feel it every time. The menu is not.

So let's build a future where people can see how the menu was made, and change it.