A conversation with Dr. Imran Rashid on AI, technology, and behavior

We are living through a special moment in history. The technology designed to optimise our lives is quietly rewiring how we think, sleep, and make decisions. Most of us sense it, but few of us understand it.

I sat down with Dr. Imran Rashid, who is a medical doctor, a bestselling author and an advisor on technology's impact on human behavior, to talk about the mechanisms behind behavioral manipulation, what's coming with advanced AI, and what might be our only real defense: reclaiming what he calls cognitive sovereignty. This also goes for our sleep. Can we control the way we think, before we sleep?

The conversation started where most do these days, with a simple observation that nothing about our current moment is actually simple. We don’t fully understand. Not yet. 

The first 500 milliseconds

"Humans aren't rational," Imran says, settling into the conversation. "We operate on instinct first, intention second. Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for describing this: we have a fast way of thinking and a slow way. The problem is that most of us are living in fast mode."

This is where the tech industry found its opening.

"What they discovered is that if you understand instinct, you can predict behavior. If you can predict it, you can exploit it." There's a chain reaction that happens in milliseconds, he explains. You see something, and your biochemistry reacts. Your body responds. Your behavior follows. And if someone knows the exact stimulus that triggers that chain (the color, the timing, the social proof, the scarcity cue), they can control what comes next. That is what AI used in the wrong way could optimise for. 

"It's about triggering our subconscious mind. That's why it's so powerful. You don't need your conscious mind to agree. Your nervous system has already decided." He leans forward slightly. "The tech industry built an entire economy around sensation. What you see, hear, smell, touch, taste. It's massively profitable because it doesn't require free will."

The architecture of manipulation, it turns out, is precise. And it's getting more precise with AI.

The Personalisation Trap

The closer a platform can target you individually, the harder resistance becomes. Hyperpersonalisation isn't just more effective; it's nearly impossible to defend against.

"If I know you respond to a very specific type of visual stimulus, and I deliver it directly to you in the exact moment you're vulnerable and your mental guards are down, you can't say no to it," Imran says. "It's like trying to protect yourself from a magnet you didn't know existed. You're no longer fighting a generic ad campaign. You're fighting something engineered specifically for your vulnerabilities."

The word "vulnerabilities" sits there and it should unsettle us.

"The question nobody's asking is: what happens when AI scales this infinitely?" he continues. "Right now, the most capable AI systems have an IQ equivalent of around 155 (Einstein level, PhD level). Systems that can process information and find patterns faster than any human brain ever could. But that's not where we're headed."

I ask him where we are headed.

"The next generation will probably reach something like 1,500. And we have no framework for understanding what that means."

What we don't know?

A system that intelligent could collect every data point about your life. Your sleep patterns. Your fridge contents. Your biometrics. Your location. Your behavior. It could build a perfect map of how to hack you.

"Think about Deep Blue beating Kasparov at chess," he says. "That was a breakthrough: a computer that could predict the next move better than a human. But then there was Go. The board is so vast that the number of possible outcomes exceeds the number of stars in the universe. Everyone assumed computers could never win because they don't have intuition."

Then a computer made a move that was described as "if God played Go." So far outside human thinking that no human could have imagined it. The best player in the world lost.

"You don't know what you don't know," I say.

"Exactly. And when you build a system with an IQ of 1,500, you genuinely don't know what it will think of humans. Do you spend time thinking about the emotional lives of ants?" He pauses. "Yet we built an entire civilisation on top of them."

This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. Many of the people building these systems, he tells me, estimate there's about a ten percent chance it will wipe out humanity. That's not theoretical. That's a probability being discussed by the people most qualified to assess it.

"If I knew there was a ten percent chance a plane would fall out of the sky, I wouldn't get on it," I respond.

"No one would. And yet we're building this. That should tell us something."

The Erosion Within

But before we reach that horizon, something more immediate is already happening. Every scroll, every notification, every algorithmically-personalized piece of content is eroding something we barely notice we're losing: our ability to think.

"Cognitive sovereignty," Imran calls it. "Your ability to concentrate. To control your own thoughts. Why wouldn't you be able to control what you think? But it's exactly what's under attack. And that affects our sleep as well."

Each time you react to personalised content, each time you spend an hour on a commercial algorithm, each time you choose stimulation over silence, you're eroding your own capacity for reflection and focus. This isn't dramatic; it happens in small decisions, everywhere, all the time.

The problem deepens when you consider what happens in the absence of stimulation. "The moment you're always reachable, always scrolling, always on, your brain never gets the chance to process what's happened," he explains. "You never have silence. You never have boredom. And in those spaces, something critical happens."

What spaces? I ask.

"Your default mode network activates. That's the part of your brain that settles things. It processes and sorts everything that's happened. It sediments your experiences. This happens during sleep, but it also happens throughout the day when you daydream or sit quietly. It's how your brain actually makes sense of the world."

But there's another piece, equally important. "You get access to interoception. Your ability to feel what's going on inside your body. Am I hurting? Am I tired? Am I hungry? Am I energised?" He looks at me directly. "If your brain is constantly processing incoming signals, you'll never receive your inside signals. You'll never hear your own voice."

Constant stimulation doesn't just distract us from the world. It disconnects us from ourselves. And when that connection is lost, agency follows.

The friction week

This is where the conversation shifts. Because Imran has proposed something practical: a reset protocol he calls the Friction Week.

"It's not new," he says immediately. "It's old. If you look across religions and indigenous cultures (Shabbat, Ramadan, the siesta), there are always rituals built around rest. Humans have ritualised recovery for thousands of years."

His proposal is to formalise it. The first week of every month, you reset. Dopamine levels. Sensory inputs. You go back to basics.

"The first two days: no digital stimulation at all," he outlines. "Read books. Write on paper. Go out in nature. Sleep better.Talk to people. Reset your senses."

What does that actually accomplish? I ask, skeptical.

"You gain contrast. When you step away from artificial stimulation, you start to see it for what it is. You have a reference point. You realise how designed it all is. And that awareness gives you power."

He pauses, and his voice becomes more insistent.

"But here's the critical part: this can't just be an individual practice. It has to become a social norm. If everyone did this, if your workplace did it, if schools did it, if governments mandated it, you'd see a massive shift in access to the foundational hormones of a good life. Oxytocin. Human touch. Eye contact. Things we're losing. A friction week creates space for all of that to come back."

Demanding Transparency

The framework he's pushing goes further. He calls it sensory transparency: a radical reimagining of how we regulate technology.

"Every app, every platform, every digital product should be required to disclose: What senses does your product affect? What hormones does it trigger? What biochemistry does it change? What behavior does it produce?"

The inconsistency he's pointing to is stark. "A melatonin spray is highly regulated. You have to label it. You have to say children under a certain age shouldn't use it. You have to meet safety standards." He lets this hang for a moment. "An app that destroys sleep? Completely unregulated. And yet one builds sleep, the other destroys it."

We're treating a biochemical intervention differently depending on whether it comes in a bottle or a notification. "That's obviously backwards," I say.

"It is. We need to treat digital products as what they are: interventions in human biochemistry at a population scale. That requires a completely new understanding of what a human being is and what we actually want to become."

The three paths ahead

The future isn't singular. Imran sees three distinct possibilities, each emerging from how we choose to build and deploy AI.

"The first is what I call the intention economy," he begins. "We learn to use AI to help us do what we actually want to do. You want better sleep, well then AI optimises your environment and habits. You want to improve your health, then AI becomes a tool for that. The wearables are already moving in this direction. In this future, AI becomes an extension of your agency, not a replacement for it."

That's the optimistic path. The other two are darker.

"The second is passivity. AI becomes so capable that you become redundant. Everything you can do, AI can do better. Someone else profits. You fill a gap. You have no purpose, no agency."

And then there's the third.

"Control. AI manages you entirely. We're seeing it already in China with the social credit system. You exist for the system. The system doesn't exist for you. A giant ant pile where every decision is predetermined."

I ask him which path he thinks we're on.

"We're still at the fork," he says carefully. "But if AI is used to manipulate us into consumption, we lose agency. If it's used to control us, we lose freedom. If it does everything for us, we lose the traits and purpose that make us human. Purpose requires struggle. Growth requires friction."

What gives Imran hope?

The question I ask next is the one that matters most in a moment like this: What gives you hope?

"The fact that we're having this conversation," he answers. "The fact that people are starting to ask these questions. Because the future isn't predetermined. There's still a choice."

He's talking about conscious resistance. Not the dramatic kind, but the daily kind. Friction weeks. Demanding transparency. Understanding how we're being influenced so we can choose whether to be influenced.

"It requires waking up," I say.

"Exactly. And that's where sleep comes in. Because you can't wake up fully rested if you didn’t sleep well enough, deep enough and long enough. Also, if you don’t sleep, you won’t be able to dream of a better future" he says with a smile. 

It all starts with understanding what's happening. Then it continues with small, deliberate acts of resistance. Reading instead of scrolling. Sleeping instead of optimising. Thinking instead of reacting.

The future isn't something that happens to you no matter what. It's something you build. But you have to be rested enough to build it.

Bio: Dr. Imran Rashid is a Doctor, researcher, author, and advisor on technology's impact on human behavior and well-being. Laura Kanadel is the founder of The Sleep Institute and MUUN. Read more about his book here: www.senselessthebook.com