GoKawiilMy notes for this essay, written on a plane with no internet and no AI :D
I have been observing, in myself and in those around me, a tendency to increasingly offload our thinking to AI. From trivial decisions to complex thinking, it is easy, convenient, and in some cases, encouraged, to use AI for researching, reasoning, and answering our every query.
I recently read “The Perfect Match” by Ken Liu, a 2012 short story which describes this phenomenon with unexpected accuracy. In the story, a universal AI assistant named Tilly serves users by offering useful and enjoyable recommendations. The main character asks Tilly questions like “What do you recommend I do for breakfast this morning?” and defers to Tilly to find him a suitable person to go on a date with. The main character does not know what he wants to eat for breakfast, what music he would like to listen to, nor what to say on his date. “Who knows your tastes and moods better than I?” quips Tilly in an affectionate voice.
My friend recently went to a San Francisco startup event, where he encountered a man with a small device pinned to his shirt. The device was a sleek little capsule of polished metal, no more than two fingers wide. My friend asked about the device, and the man said it was a microphone which he used to record all of his conversations. At the end of the day, Microphone Man would kick off a workflow to summarize and analyze all of the conversations. He said, with the enthusiasm of a tech bro unveiling his latest setup, “I think Claude Fable is smarter than me. It’s better at critical thinking than I am, so I let Fable do all of my thinking these days.” (Side note: his startup is replacing human engineers by capturing their every input and operation, but without their explicit consent. He has offloaded his own thinking to AI, and made a business of offloading everyone else’s.)
An AI-generated image of Microphone Man based on the description from my friend + my imagination.
Before Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini became household names, we were already offloading parts of our thinking to search engines. But search still required us to break down a question, evaluate sources, and synthesize an answer. AI increasingly performs those intermediate steps for us, producing a finished response to even complex or esoteric questions in minutes.
Tools like Google Deep Research and OpenAI Deep Research can now do work that might once have taken a single human being, minutes, hours, or days (see METR’s Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models). It saves you time, and it saves you thinking.
The duration at which an LLM is predicted to succeed at different software tasks 50% of the time, from METR’s Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models .
But it is a fine line between having an assistant that helps with your tasks, and losing all of your autonomy. Perhaps the question to ask is: who is making all of the final decisions for the things that really matter to you in your life?
In Ken Liu’s story, the main character believes that the algorithm knows him better than himself: “Everything Tilly suggests to me has been scientifically proven to fit my taste profile, to be something I’d like … What’s wrong with listening to Tilly so that the perfect product finds the perfect consumer, the perfect girl finds the perfect boy?” He defers all decisions, as trivial as what to wear and as important as how to find love, to his assistant. The Microphone Man, similarly, defers all higher-level thinking to Claude, which he believes is smarter than he is in all respects.
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