GoKawiilCognition with the help of AI is already a significant force in our world, resulting in humanity-sized missed opportunities and risks. In this article, we will explore the risks of AI-assisted cognition and how to use these tools without falling into the trap of intellectual stagnation.
To understand what AI-assisted cognition is, we first need to understand what cognition is.
“Cognitions are mental processes that deal with knowledge. They encompass psychological activities that acquire, store, retrieve, transform, or apply information. Cognitions are a pervasive part of mental life, helping individuals understand and interact with the world.” Q: Wikipedia
Cognition can be assisted by external static information or external cognition.
For example, most people would put a book into the category of external static information and a discussion about a topic with another human, because humans think and process information themselves, into the external cognition category.
But where do discussions with AIs fit in? They are able to process information that can result in original solutions, but they are still static and currently cannot learn.
In early 2026, the USA prepared to invade Greenland and, therefore, the EU. Only a few months prior to that it was completely unthinkable that the USA would even think about threatening an invasion of Greenland. As AI base models are stuck in the past, they do not easily accept these events as real and often label them as “hypothetical”, “fake news”, or “impossible”. This also affects new models like Gemini 3 Pro, GLM-5 or GPT-5.3-codex.
As most new LLMs are just post-trained on a base model that is relatively old, even when post-trained on new events, they do not completely utilize this information in their cognition and are still skewed towards the static patterns of the base model’s hidden states. They basically think something different from what they say.
So you might see the problem here already: If a lot of people use AIs to discuss, write, autocomplete, and brainstorm, but AI cognition does not reflect new events and cultural changes, like the change in the relationship between the USA and the EU, new geopolitical realities, and the EU population’s stance toward the USA, people will be skewed toward these old patterns and ideas. Cultural change has to build and maintain momentum indefinitely to persist against the static cognitive skew of AIs.
Human knowledge and ideas, and thus human development, are highly dependent on the Dynamic Dialectic Substrate.
... continue reading