Is AI Making It Too Easy to Stop Thinking?

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A new national survey from Elon University hooked me right from the title: "Human Purpose in Peril." The survey of 1,505 American adults doesn't simply look at the bits and bytes of technology but at artificial intelligence (AI) through a very human lens.

This survey really hits home. For several years, I've been writing about two very different ways we can engage with AI: iterative intelligence and cognitive surrender. Iterative intelligence describes the human-machine interaction in which AI stimulates and extends our thinking. Cognitive surrender begins when that assistance starts to substitute for the thinking itself. This new survey offers an interesting perspective on both.

Iterative Intelligence

With Iterative Intelligence, I ask a question, and AI responds. That response changes my thinking, which changes my next question. I can challenge the answer or reconsider my original assumption. This engagement can even take the conversation somewhere I hadn't anticipated. The prompt prompts the prompter.

There are hints of this in the new survey. Forty-two percent of large language model (LLM) users say AI has improved their critical thinking and problem-solving. Forty-five percent say it has improved their creativity. And a majority—52 percent—report greater motivation to learn new skills and concepts.

These are encouraging findings, and I believe that they are consistent with what many of us experience every day. AI can be a powerful cognitive companion. Yet the same survey reveals another pattern that is much less comfortable or optimistic.

Cognitive Surrender

I've used cognitive surrender to describe what happens when we increasingly allow AI to take over parts of our own thinking. Two findings caught my attention in both topic and the percentages.

• 51 percent of LLM users say they've felt they were being lazy or taking a too-easy shortcut when using AI.
• 39 percent say they've become too dependent on LLMs for answers rather than thinking things through themselves.

These numbers don't prove cognitive surrender, but they might be symptomatic of the condition. More interesting is the question of why people might surrender their thinking in the first place—to sidestep the very process that defines who we are. This is something I've called cognitive selfhood. Two findings might offer some clues.

• 56 percent of users believe the AI is smarter than they are.
• 73 percent say their LLM has better ideas than they do, at least some of the time.

So, maybe cognitive surrender doesn't begin with laziness. If I believe AI is smarter than I am, and that belief is reinforced by the experience that it can generate better ideas, then handing over some of the cognitive heavy lifting may seem perfectly reasonable. Handing over some of the cognitive heavy lifting may even seem like the intelligent thing to do.

That's where the boundary between iterative intelligence and cognitive surrender gets both complicated and interesting. The better AI becomes at thinking with us, the easier it may become to let it think for us.

What Happens to Our Thinking?

This question pushes past the mundane issues of drafting emails and essays. I've recently argued that human thought itself is part of the substrate of innovation. The distance between the question and answer is essential territory for innovation. Struggling with a problem or taking a wrong turn can generate ideas that weren't contained in the answer we originally sought.

AI is increasingly capable of removing some of that friction. The output may improve, yet we still have to ask what happens to the cognitive process underneath it.

So, this brings us right back to "Human Purpose in Peril." Nearly two-thirds of Americans surveyed believe that replacing humans in most tasks will undermine our sense of purpose and meaning in life. That's an extraordinary finding—one that shifts the conversation away from AI expansion alone and toward the preservation of human capacity and agency.

Perhaps today's concern isn't only about jobs or economic displacement. It may also reflect something more intimate about our relationship with our own minds. And while AI may be the first great technology designed to relieve the burdens of the mind, what if some of those burdens were actually pleasures that define who we are?