Are We Offloading Too Much Thinking to AI?
Original: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
Why This Matters
As AI handles more cognitive tasks, the debate over human autonomy and dependency is becoming central to responsible AI adoption.
Writer Yennie Jun observes a growing trend of people delegating decisions — from trivial to complex — to AI assistants. Citing Ken Liu's 2012 short story and a real encounter at a San Francisco startup event, she questions whether AI use is eroding human cognitive autonomy.
In an essay published July 14, 2026, Yennie Jun reflects on the increasing tendency to delegate thinking to AI tools. She draws a parallel to Ken Liu's 2012 short story 'The Perfect Match,' in which a fictional AI assistant named Tilly makes all decisions for a user — from breakfast to dating — because it claims to know the user's tastes better than the user does.
Jun also recounts a real-world encounter shared by a friend at a San Francisco startup event. A man wearing a recording device on his shirt stated: '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.' That same man's startup reportedly captures engineers' inputs and operations without their explicit consent.
Jun notes that search engines already enabled partial cognitive offloading, but AI now handles the intermediate steps — source evaluation, synthesis, reasoning — that search once left to the user. She references METR's Task-Completion Time Horizons report, which tracks how AI models are completing increasingly complex tasks over longer time horizons. Jun frames the core question as: who is ultimately making the decisions that matter most in your life?