Imparting Human Cognition Into AI Is Steering Humanity Into A Dismal Mental Ditch

In today’s column, I examine a significant and disconcerting phenomenon that is happening right now concerning human cognition and AI on a population-level scale. The deal is this. People are increasingly offloading their mental capacities to generative AI and large language models (LLMs), letting the AI do the heavy lifting for their valued minds. Real-world human cognitive capabilities are reportedly declining.

This is happening on an innocuous, decision-by-decision basis—across hundreds of millions of people who tap into popular LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, etc. daily and weekly. Tracking any reduction in mental acuity is typically undertaken at an individual level. The adverse impact is measured on this person here or that person there as they progressively undermine their thinking capacity. What if this keeps occurring relentlessly on a population-scale basis? Size hurts. Humanity across the board will find itself facing a disastrous deficit in cognition. An immense reliance and outsized dependency on AI as our outsourced source of thinking is happening right in front of our eyes.

Let’s talk about it. This analysis of AI breakthroughs is part of my ongoing Forbes column coverage of the latest in AI, including identifying and explaining key AI complexities (see the link here).

The Minds Problem

Much of the handwringing about AI is whether AI is going to become sentient and embody consciousness, often referred to as AI as a thinking machine. That is an important topic and one that I’ve continued to closely explore and analyze; see the link here. There is a quite different angle that also deserves rapt attention, and I’d like to place it on the table.

How will human minds change because of interacting with AI?

Outsourcing Of Minds

Research On AI And Human Cognition

Let’s unpack some of those points.

AI As Cognitive Virus

People Directly Impacted

My segmentation is as follows: