Most people treat AI as a tool. It is one. But it affects our minds differently than other tools have.
As humans, we have always been shaped by what we build. Books restructured how we think. Social media reshaped how we attend. AI is doing something that neither of those did.
It's participating in cognition itself.
It generates thoughts, refines them, and increasingly performs the parts of thinking that we used to do ourselves. The last part is what I keep returning to.
Learning has always been bound up with friction: with the slow work of moving through confusion toward clarity. The effort isn't a side effect of the learning. It is a part of what produces the understanding. When you struggle with an idea, something forms in that struggle that doesn't form when the answer is handed to you.
Delegate that work to a machine and you gain speed. What you lose is harder to see, because it's the thing that would have grown if you'd done the work yourself.
I write this while using AI regularly. It helps me learn faster, work through concepts, and sometimes even process emotions. I am not opposed to it. I am trying to understand it.
What I've noticed is how quickly the reach for AI becomes reflexive. The friction it removes is exactly the friction that used to do the work. So I've started imposing a boundary. I think first. I try to sit with the idea for long enough to feel the edges of my own confusion before I bring it to AI to expand or refine. Not to replace thinking. To extend it.
Whether that boundary holds is a different question.
Whether it holds at scale, across a generation that grows up with AI as default, I don't know. I don't think anyone knows yet. The question worth sitting with isn't whether AI is good or bad. It's what happens to a mind that no longer needs to do the work that minds used to have to do.
That's what I want to keep exploring here.