CONCEPT
The Surrender
Collins's 2018 diagnosis of the cultural pathology by which humans defer to computers not because the machines are genuinely competent but because their outputs look competent — the moment when interactional fluency is mistaken for contributory understanding, at civilizational scale.
The Surrender is the central warning of Collins's 2018 book Artifictional Intelligence: Against Humanity's Surrender to Computers. It is not a prediction that machines will defeat us through superior capability. It is a diagnosis of a human failure: the gradual erosion of the evaluative vigilance that would allow us to distinguish mimeomorphic surface from polimorphic substance. The Surrender is the slow, individual-by-individual, interaction-by-interaction process of accepting fluent output as competent output because evaluating the difference requires expertise the evaluator may not possess.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Collins's framing inverts the standard AI-risk discourse. The popular concern is that machines will become too powerful. Collins's concern is that humans will become too deferential — that we will surrender our evaluative capacity not because the machines deserve it but because exercising the capacity is difficult and the machines' outputs are reassuring. The Surrender is a behavioral drift, not a dramatic capitulation.