The Burden of Intelligence

"Artificial intelligence has, to use another ubiquitous word, made cognition precariously abundant. Answers arrive instantly and patterns surface with little to no effort. Judgment is technologically packaged and delivered with a confidence that increasingly rivals, if not often exceeds our own. My central point here is that this isn't simply another technological advance but marks the first time human cognition itself appears to be on the obsolescence curve."

"We have replaced tools before, but we have never replaced thinking. That's why this moment feels different to me. AI isn't extending human effort in the way machines once extended muscle or speed. It's occupying territory we once assumed was uniquely human that includes reasoning, synthesis, interpretation. In many domains, AI often performs these functions better than we do. And this is a claim many resist, because it contradicts how we have always understood progress-generally slow, incremental, and occasionally punctuated by sudden change."

Intelligence has shifted from scarcity to abundance as AI delivers instant answers and pattern recognition with minimal effort. Judgment and reasoning are now technologically packaged, often with confidence that rivals or exceeds human judgment. AI occupies cognitive territories once considered uniquely human, performing reasoning, synthesis, interpretation, diagnosis, and creativity at operational scales. Ethical reasoning can be codified, trade-offs formalized, and prohibitions managed at scale, making moral constraints programmable. The central risk is not smarter machines but human disengagement from responsibility for consequences, which humans must continue to bear and manage.

Read at Psychology Today