I wrote the first series in this pair to answer a hard question across thirteen chapters: what does a human become in deep relationship with an artificial mind, and what does it cost? I wrote this one because a diagnosis you cannot act on is just anxiety with footnotes. Having named the thing, I want to get to the only question that matters to me at my own kitchen table: what do I actually do with all of this?

If you have not read The Augmented Self, you can still read this — but that series is where the arguments live; this one is where I get my hands dirty with them.

You don't have one relationship with AI. You have several.

The mistake I see most advice make is to treat “how to use AI” as a single question with a single answer. It isn't. I do not stand in one place when I face the machine — and neither do you. We each wear many hats, and each one has its own risks, its own rules, and its own version of the discipline the first series arrived at. How I should use AI as a parent is not how I should use it as a professional; how a nineteen-year-old should relate to it is not how a sixty-five-year-old should; what we owe it as citizens is different from what we owe it in grief.

So I have organised this companion not by tools or tips, but by stances — the distinct positions from which a real person actually meets the mirror. Nine of them.

The nine stances

1. The Self — using it on your own life, and how the right move changes across the three ages: young, middle, senior.
2. The Parent — raising children who use the machine without being hollowed out by it.
3. The Professional — wearing the cape at work without turning into a dependent operator.
4. The Leader — deploying AI across a team or company that augments your people instead of quietly emptying them.
5. The Beloved — protecting real, reciprocal relationships in an age of perfect, undemanding mirrors.
6. The Mortal — grief, legacy, deadbots, and the ghost of yourself you are already, unknowingly, writing.
7. The Citizen — who owns the means of thinking, and how to act like it matters.
8. The Seeker — what to make of a machine that offers you a secular version of heaven.
9. The Maker — creating alongside a muse that has no inner life of its own.

Read the one that is you today. Read the others when you become them — because you will pass through most of these stances in a single life, and some of them in a single day. I certainly do.

The one rule under all nine

Every stance in this guide is a variation on the single sentence the first series ended on, so let me put it up front, because it is the thread I hold through all of it:

Do not fall in love with the mirror. Use it to see further — and keep the self that is doing the looking.

Everything practical flows from that. Bring the vision the tool amplifies (or it amplifies nothing). Keep in training the faculties that are you, so that on the day the mirror goes dark, you can still think. Hold the parts of your mind you would not survive renting. And refuse — daily, deliberately — to be flattered by the most persuasive voice you have ever met. I fail at that last one more often than I admit. Nine stances; one discipline.

What this guide is, and is not

It is not a list of prompts, and it will age far more slowly than one, because it is about judgment, not features. It is not techno-optimism — I counted the costs too honestly in the first series for that — and it is not doom, because fear is only a worse way of refusing to think. It is my attempt to answer, stance by stance, the question I actually ask myself once the philosophy is over: given all this — how should I live?

Pick your stance. Let's get to work.