Is AI Making Us Lazy?—Òur Four Cognitive Options

A recent MIT study made waves because it suggested a cognitive decline when students delegated too much of their thinking to AI. Are our cognitive skills doomed? Is AI making us lazy?

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In the study charmingly titled "Your Brain on ChatGPT," researchers found students outsourcing essays had limp brain wiring, fuzzy memories, and barely any sense of ownership over their work compared to those who wrote without AI assistance. Numerous writers followed suit, with essay after essay decrying the impact of AI on education in particular and society at large.

But how big is the laziness problem, really? When researchers and essayists only discuss what is lost in one place and don't evaluate what is gained elsewhere, who is being lazy?

Respond and Adapt

I once owned a cranky second-hand typewriter that demanded constant attention—dusting, cleaning, ribbon changes, and the delicate art of not typing too fast lest the little hammers jam together like drunken acrobats. For years, I nursed that mechanical beast through hundreds of pages of letters, stories, and my own personal pop charts.

That typewriter is long gone, replaced by tablets and computers that have their own maintenance rituals: updates, bug fixes, screen cleanings, and cover replacements. Less cognitive overhead, sure, but I'm still dreaming of the day my AI assistant can handle all the mundane busywork while I focus on the good stuff—idea generation, content creation, and insight dissemination.

But why stop there? I've already traded paper dictionaries for spell-checkers and thesauruses. Physical notebooks gave way to digital ones, then to chatbots. And those slow, methodical reflection techniques that traditional writers use—outlining, reading aloud, printing and correcting—got steamrolled by rapid-fire conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. These AI companions are available 24/7 and, frankly, give me much better feedback than I could ever give myself.

Now we're entering the next phase: prompting the tools to do the thinking for us. Depending on what I'm writing, I can get ChatGPT to research, structure, draft, review, revise, and even complete entire pieces for me. I could theoretically let AI handle almost everything while I preserve my mental energy for problem-solving, strategic thinking, and relationship-building. Or I could just stare out the window of my local coffee bar like a 21st century Douglas Adams.

The MIT study mentioned earlier focused on students, but this delegation dance is happening everywhere—graphic artists, software engineers, legal consultants, college professors. We're all handing off cognitive tasks to machines at an unprecedented pace.

So when we delegate our thinking to the machines, are we facing cognitive decline? Are the machines making us lazy?

Are we facing cognitive decline? Are the machines making us lazy?

That depends. Toward which of these four archetypes are our behaviors pulling us?

The Outsourcer (Cognitive Loss)

When we use tools to replace bottom-of-the-stack skills, we inevitably lose some abilities—what researchers call deskilling. For example, I've forgotten how typewriters work, and honestly, I don't care. I also wouldn't mourn losing the skill of updating device software. I've also never cared much about punctuation or the proper spelling and grammar of English words (an utterly illogical mess anyway). I'm happy to let machines adapt my writing to prevailing linguistic conventions.

But what do I do with the extra time and brainpower I save by outsourcing my work? I have novels to read, TV shows to watch, music playlists to explore. Oh, and that PlayStation 5 in the next room is practically gathering dust, loaded with games I've never been able to finish!

Indeed, I wouldn't be alone in using the time freed by automation for entertainment and consumption only. However, while I try not to judge how other people spend their time, survival in the future of work demands a growth mindset primed for curiosity and continuous learning. The time saved at the bottom of the stack could fuel activities at the top. If we choose to be merely an outsourcer of tasks, we're heading toward cognitive loss—and, indeed, laziness.

If we choose to be an outsourcer of tasks, we're heading toward cognitive loss—and laziness.

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The Explorer (Cognitive Shift)

Alternatively, we can use our newfound mental bandwidth to move up the stack: thinking more strategically at higher levels of abstraction, what some of us call upskilling. We'd spend more time strategizing, philosophizing, debating politics and ethics, discussing what's dumb and what's wise within our sphere of influence. While complicated but solvable problems get delegated to machines, humans get to tackle the complex and wicked problems of the future<