Category: Reflections

Lately I’ve been following a discussion that worries me quite a bit: to what extent are we delegating our thinking to AI. It’s not an abstract or philosophical question, it’s something very real I’m seeing day to day in our profession and in society in general.

Recently I read an article by Erik Johannes Husom titled “Outsourcing thinking” that, among other things, discusses the concept of “lump of cognition fallacy”. The idea is that, just as there’s an economic fallacy saying there’s a fixed amount of work to do, some believe there’s a fixed amount of thinking to do, and if machines think for us, we’ll just think about other things.

A few days ago Anthropic published a paper that gave me much to think about. It’s titled “Disempowerment patterns in real-world AI usage” and analyzes, for the first time at scale, how AI interactions may be diminishing our capacity for autonomous judgment.

And no, we’re not talking about science fiction scenarios like “Skynet taking control.” We’re talking about something much more subtle and, perhaps for that reason, more dangerous: the voluntary cession of our critical judgment to an AI system.