Welcome back to Plane Thoughts.

This morning, my best friend told me she has begun playing sudoku and other brain games daily as a way to slow down the cognitive decline that happens in later life. Just like the muscles in our bodies, the mind must be worked to be kept strong.

However, a tool many of us now use daily may be relieving our brains of exactly that work. And because it happens in the background, we are barely noticing it happening.

Ask an AI tool a question and the response is clear, structured and confident. That clarity is the appeal, and the risk. A well-articulated answer creates a strong sense of understanding, and it is easy to mistake that feeling for the real thing. The problem you asked about is as messy and uncertain as it was before. Only your sense of it has changed.

Think of how you used to work something out: gathering competing views, weighing them, sitting with not being sure. That effort was not incidental; the friction was where your understanding was built and your conclusions tested.

When a polished answer arrives in seconds, the incentive to do that work is greatly reduced. Why labour through the thinking when the conclusion is already so well expressed? A subtle shift occurs from interrogating information to simply accepting it.

Psychologists describe the mind as running in two modes: a fast, instinctive one that reaches for the quickest answer, and a slow, deliberate one that reasons things through. Recent academic work proposes a third: artificial cognition operating outside the brain. It predicts something called cognitive surrender, where we adopt the AI output with minimal scrutiny, overriding both intuition and deliberation.

This is not the same as delegating a task, as you might ask someone to pull together some research. Surrender is the point at which you stop evaluating the answer and adopt the machine's judgement as your own.

This happens over time. Skip the deliberative check once and it costs nothing. Repeat it, and the reflex becomes the default. The threshold is crossed unnoticed, because from your perspective it still feels like deciding.

The evidence is beginning to show the cost. AI sharpens performance in the moment yet leaves people less able to think independently once the tool is taken away. Even brief use trains us to expect an instant answer and to disengage the moment a problem demands sustained effort.

More troubling, leaning on these tools appears to increase confidence even when the conclusion is wrong. Faster, surer and wrong is a dangerous combination.

I say all this as a heavy user of AI; only a few editions ago I wrote about using AI as a thinking partner to redesign my digital life.

The concept of thinking partner is what holds the distinction. A partner informs your deliberation rather than replacing it: form your own view first, then use AI to challenge it. Interrogate what comes back. Ask the follow-up questions. Keep the right to override.

Friction, counterintuitively, is a feature of good thinking and decision-making, not a flaw.

My friend has the right instinct. The mind adapts to the demands placed upon it, and no demand means no strength. The tools will keep getting better at answering; make sure you are still doing your reps. In the age of AI, the questions you ask are more important than the answers you know.

When did you last sit with a problem long enough to feel unsure?

That discomfort is not a delay in the thinking. It is the thinking.

And of course, ¡Vamos España!

— AJ

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