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How Cognitive Offshoring is Killing Personal Thought
We are building a world where nobody remembers how they know what they know.
This sounds like the premise of a dystopian novel. It is, in fact, a relatively normal Monday.
A note-taking app reminds you of the paper you read last April. A summarizer digests it into four bullet points. A chatbot recommends you cite it. A search assistant drafts the paragraph for you. All you have to do is nod. The interface even thanks you.
This is the point where someone usually pipes up and says: “But calculators didn’t kill math!”
Which is true. But they did change which kinds of math we teach, which kinds we value, and which kinds we forget. When a skill becomes automatic, it stops being foundational. And when a skill becomes foundational only in the abstract, it’s easy to overlook what’s been hollowed out.
The current wave of AI productivity tools is reshaping cognition more subtly than calculators, and faster than Google. It’s answering our questions before we realize we had them. It’s an intellectually lethal optimization of attention, and he result is knowledge without contact. Facts without friction. Intelligence as a service.
