Really liked this. The framing of fire and agriculture as cognitive expansions and AI as the first reversal is genuinely clarifying.
The MIT detail about ChatGPT users having weaker recall of their own essays weeks later is what made me think the most, even of my own use of AI in handling tasks.
Writing the words yourself is what makes them yours; if the machine writes them, they were never really yours to forget.
Do you think there's any version of AI use that doesn't have this effect, or is the offloading baked into the tool?
Thank you. From what I understood of the MIT study, the effects did not appear to be uniform. Participants who relied on ChatGPT from the outset showed weaker recall and a lower sense of ownership over their essays, while those who first worked through the task themselves and only later gained access to AI appeared to remain more engaged with the material.
That doesn't necessarily mean cognitive offloading isn't part of the tool, but it does suggest that how and when we use AI may matter just as much as the technology itself.
Noir, the MIT study is suggestive rather than dispositive, but its most valuable implication may be that the decisive variable is not AI use itself; it is where AI enters the cognitive sequence.
If a person first frames the problem, forms a provisional model, and produces an initial argument, AI can function as an adversarial editor or cognitive scaffold. If it enters before those operations, it can replace the very struggle through which memory, ownership, and judgment are formed. The same tool can therefore augment cognition or displace it.
This may refine the idea of an “evolutionary reversal.” AI does not simply reduce thought; it redistributes it. The danger begins when the capacity it frees is not reinvested in verification, counterargument, and synthesis—leaving the human accountable for conclusions whose underlying reasoning they no longer possess.
Really liked this. The framing of fire and agriculture as cognitive expansions and AI as the first reversal is genuinely clarifying.
The MIT detail about ChatGPT users having weaker recall of their own essays weeks later is what made me think the most, even of my own use of AI in handling tasks.
Writing the words yourself is what makes them yours; if the machine writes them, they were never really yours to forget.
Do you think there's any version of AI use that doesn't have this effect, or is the offloading baked into the tool?
Thank you. From what I understood of the MIT study, the effects did not appear to be uniform. Participants who relied on ChatGPT from the outset showed weaker recall and a lower sense of ownership over their essays, while those who first worked through the task themselves and only later gained access to AI appeared to remain more engaged with the material.
That doesn't necessarily mean cognitive offloading isn't part of the tool, but it does suggest that how and when we use AI may matter just as much as the technology itself.
Noir, the MIT study is suggestive rather than dispositive, but its most valuable implication may be that the decisive variable is not AI use itself; it is where AI enters the cognitive sequence.
If a person first frames the problem, forms a provisional model, and produces an initial argument, AI can function as an adversarial editor or cognitive scaffold. If it enters before those operations, it can replace the very struggle through which memory, ownership, and judgment are formed. The same tool can therefore augment cognition or displace it.
This may refine the idea of an “evolutionary reversal.” AI does not simply reduce thought; it redistributes it. The danger begins when the capacity it frees is not reinvested in verification, counterargument, and synthesis—leaving the human accountable for conclusions whose underlying reasoning they no longer possess.