I prompt, therefore I am

Thinking is now optional in the age of AI.

Something is happening. No big moment. No tipping point. A shortcut here, a suggestion there. Quietly, steadily, AI has started doing the thinking for us. And the more it does, the less we seem to do.

This isn’t about the decline of intelligence (although research suggests that’s happening as well). It’s about the decline of effort, about process, about how we learn and make decisions. And that’s what’s starting to change, especially for the next generation.

There’s a term for this shift: cognitive offloading. We’ve been doing it for years. Calculators take care of maths. Satnav gives us directions. Google answers every argument. Now AI writes our emails, summarises meetings, answers homework, brainstorms ideas, builds pitch decks, and even composes love letters.

None of this is bad in itself, but when it becomes default behaviour - when we skip the struggle every time - we start to lose the skills we used to rely on. Ask AI to do the thinking often enough, and eventually, you forget how to do it yourself.

If my teacher friends are right, you’re starting to see this most clearly in schools. It’s not just that students are using AI to cheat on essays; it’s that they’re using it to avoid the slow, messy, necessary work of figuring things out. They type in a question, copy the answer, and move on. It’s unquestionably efficient, but it’s also skipped the part that matters… where learning actually happens - the bit where you get stuck, where you question, where you try again and, eventually, start to understand.

And it’s more than just the answers being outsourced. It’s also the curiosity and the critical thinking. Kids are becoming prompt engineers, not problem solvers. They’re getting used to answers without ever needing to ask why. A recent FT article reports that problem-solving confidence among young adults is lower than ever. One Gen Z respondent said they feel mentally weaker than their parents—not because they know less, but because they’ve never had to sit with a problem and figure it out.

It’s not just anecdotal. OECD data shows adults are struggling too. Across developed countries, basic reasoning and comprehension are down. At work, the pattern is the same. It’s not just admin that’s being automated; it’s the thinking too. Research shows that the more people trust AI, the less they check its output. This isn’t efficiency; it’s complacency.

At home, it’s no different. AI curates your news feed, your shopping list, your watch list. Recommendation engines decide what you see. Algorithms get so good at guessing your preferences that you stop exploring anything else. It becomes a kind of mental autopilot. Why read the book when TikTok already summarised it? Why choose what to watch when Netflix has something ready? Why plan dinner when your fridge already has a suggestion?

We’re also reading less. We retain less of what we read, and we struggle to analyse it critically. Our attention is spread thin across platforms designed to keep us scrolling, not thinking. Long-form content feels harder to engage with. Even when we click on an article, we often skim the headline, glance at the pull quotes, maybe dip into the comments—but rarely the full piece. Viral content grabs us by the feelings, not the facts. Context is stripped away, nuance gets lost, and we’re more likely to share than to sit with an idea. It’s not that we’ve lost the ability to read deeply. We’ve just fallen out of the habit. And like any muscle, leave it unused long enough, and it starts to atrophy.

And when those habits go, so does our judgment. Without deep reading, there’s no deep thinking. Without thinking, there’s no discernment. And without that, we’re just drifting, scrolling through a world increasingly shaped by machines we don’t fully understand and content we no longer question.

This isn’t a call to reject AI. Used well, it’s a wonderful tool. But like any tool, it depends on the hand that holds it. If we’re not paying attention, we risk trading too much; not just time and effort, but the mental grit that helps us grow sharper, more curious, more capable.

So maybe the challenge isn’t whether we use AI; it’s whether we still think after we do. Whether we ask the second question. Whether we rewrite the first draft. Whether we keep some struggle in the system. Think of it like power steering. Great if you’re awake. Useless if you’ve nodded off.

That’s the risk. Not the machines rising up. But us switching off.