Human beings have always used technology to boost their life chances. Initially, we used technology to support our physical needs, through tools and later farming. About 5,500 years ago we started writing, which was built on language and may have been one of the first technologies to support our cognitive capabilities. In more recent times we have given arithmetic to the calculator, navigation to GPS, and retrieval of information to the search engine. Each time, something was lost and something was gained, and mostly we haven’t mourned the loss. I don’t miss doing long division by hand.

AI think therefore AI am

AI is different. It reaches further into the layer of reasoning itself. It can generate the hypothesis, build the argument, critique its own plan, weigh the evidence, and decide what question to ask next. Calculators did arithmetic. AI does some of the thinking.

This can happen in several ways, and the distinction between them is meaningful:

• Cognitive assistance. “Help me solve this problem.” The thinking is still mine; I’ve brought in a tool to sharpen it.
• Cognitive delegation. “Work this out for me and give me the answer.” I’ve handed over the task, but I chose to, and I could take it back.
• Cognitive dependence. “I don’t really want to think this through myself; I’ll ask AI.” The choosing has started to erode. It’s becoming the default, not the decision.
• Cognitive surrender. “AI is better at this than I am, so I’ll defer to it.” A judgement, however implicit, that the machine’s answer is simply more trustworthy than my own thinking would be.
• Cognitive substitution. “I can no longer do this, so will get AI to do it.” This isn’t really a choice anymore. The capacity itself has begun to disappear.

One of the stories we tell ourselves about AI is that it will make people less intelligent. The more likely story is that people gradually stop exercising certain cognitive muscles because they no longer experience any need to. Yet their output keeps rising.

Cognitive Wealth

Should that trouble us? Adam Smith might have recognised the argument. In The Wealth of Nations, he showed how specialisation and the right tools could dramatically increase productivity. A worker doing one narrow task, with the right machinery, could produce far more than a generalist.

If the AI produces a better answer, why mourn the fact that we didn’t work it out ourselves?

But Smith didn’t think rising output settled the matter. In the same book, he warned that a worker confined to a few operations had little occasion to exercise his understanding and could become “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” Smith saw both things as true. Specialisation made us more productive, and it could also make us less capable.

There is an important difference with AI, though. Smith’s worker became narrow in one part of his working life. His broader capacity for judgement remained intact. With AI, what we’re potentially outsourcing isn’t one particular task. It’s the act of reasoning itself. Losing long division doesn’t cost me my ability to think through a difficult decision. Losing the habit of thinking difficult things through might.

Use It, Or Lose It

This is no longer only a philosophical worry. Early evidence points in this direction. A 2025 survey of 666 participants found heavier AI use correlated with lower critical thinking scores (Gerlich, 2025). An MIT Media Lab study using EEG compared essay-writers working unaided, with a search engine, or with an AI assistant, and found the AI-assisted group had the weakest neural connectivity and the lowest sense of ownership over their own work (Kosmyna et al., 2025). Both build on an older, well-established finding: that offloading mental effort onto external tools shapes what a mind stays practised at (Risko & Gilbert, 2016).

Yet, this does not mean decline is inevitable. The flaw in the historical parallel is that Smith’s factory workers were cogs in a physical system they did not control. AI is not a conveyor belt; it is a collaborative partner. The erosion of our critical thinking isn’t an inevitable consequence of the technology. It depends, at least in part, on how we choose to deploy it.

Imagine two people working the same hard problem with AI. The first treats the system as a cognitive replacement: they ask a question, accept the first 30-second response without friction, and paste the output. They have chosen cognitive substitution.

The second treats the system as a cognitive sparring partner. They use the AI to generate counterarguments to their own hypotheses, to stress-test their logic, and to explore blind spots they couldn’t see alone. They might solve the problem in a fraction of the time, but their brain has been actively engaged in an intellectual heavy-lifting session. They have chosen cognitive expansion.

AI has the profound potential to strip away the mechanical, administrative cognitive load we currently carry. By automating the grunt work, it can free up mental space for higher-order judgement, curiosity, creativity, and the fundamental human task of deciding what is actually worth doing in the first place.

The real dividing line of the AI era is not between the technology and us. It is the boundary between using AI to extend cognition versus using it instead of cognition. If we treat AI as an escape from the challenge of thinking, substitution is likely. But if we use it to push our reasoning further than we could go alone, the technology could become a powerful amplifier of human agency.

If AI makes me more capable in practice, while making me less capable without it, have I actually become more capable? The answer depends entirely on which of us is steering the machine.

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Notes

• Gerlich, M. (2025). AI tools in society: Impacts on cognitive offloading and the future of critical thinking. Societies, 15(1), 6.
• Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., et al. (2025). Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task. arXiv preprint 2506.08872.
• Risko, E. F., & Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Cognitive offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676–688.