"Two years ago, I published a post called The Cognitive Manifesto. At the time, my optimism was genuine and sincere. AI felt like a widening horizon, and a shift that would expand our mental range and give us new ways to think and create. The future looked open and strangely hopeful and the manifesto reflected the optimistic promise of tomorrow."
"The Changing Texture of Thought Anyone who uses AI regularly knows the sensation. You begin to write and AI completes your sentence and personal chain of thought before you. At first, it feels like a sort of cognitive momentum or even efficiency. Then, over time, something inside the process changes. The small hesitations that once guided your reasoning curiously begin to become subordinate to the machine. And you start accepting its anticipations as the natural continuation of your own."
"We are now thinking in the presence of AI that generates fluent answers without understanding. It doesn't slow down, struggle, or wrestle with intention. And that difference alters the environment in which human thought takes shape. The most significant impact of AI isn't efficiency or speed. It's the quiet "digital re-engineering" of the psychological setting in which our human thinking occurs."
AI integration alters the internal process of thinking by removing small hesitations and anticipatory friction that guide reasoning. AI often completes sentences and anticipates chains of thought, creating fluent outputs without understanding. Constant fluency fosters imitation of reasoning—'counterfeit cognition'—that blurs real deliberation. The main impact is a digital re-engineering of the psychological setting in which human thought forms, not merely speed or efficiency. The present task is to preserve human depth and the slower, struggling components of cognition within the Cognitive Age rather than to simply resist AI.
Read at Psychology Today
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