Choosing to Stay Human
I’m starting to notice a growing “cognitive surrender” in our professional feeds.
We see it everywhere: perfectly polished paragraphs that say absolutely nothing. It’s what Ethan Mollick calls “meaning-shaped attention vampires.” They look like high-effort intellectual work, but they lack the friction of actual human thought.
What worries me is how easy it is to fall into this trap. When an AI gives you a perfectly structured answer, your brain wants to take the path of least resistance. It feels like productivity, but if we aren’t careful, we’re just outsourcing our ability to think. For me, writing has always been a grueling process of refining my own voice—it was that “annoying” work that built my career and my perspective. If I let an AI skip those steps for me, I lose the very thing that makes my work authentic.
The difference between using AI as a shortcut and using it as a tutor is massive. One leads to “cognitive surrender”—where we stop noticing when the tool is wrong—and the other pushes us to solve harder problems. We need to move from asking AI to do the work for us, to asking it to push us to do the work ourselves.
How are you ensuring that your use of AI is expanding your capabilities rather than just automating your thinking?
#ArtificialIntelligence #FutureOfWork #CriticalThinking #DigitalTransformation #ProfessionalDevelopment
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/choosing-to-stay-human