In a podcast interview, Sheldon Fernandez, former CEO of DarwinAI, said that he’s often asked by students how you stand out from your peers. He replied:

Read literature. Read serious contemplative fiction. Why? Two reasons: there’s a difference between immersing yourself in material in solitude, versus sampling the outputs of generative AI. Most of your generation can’t read a novel right? The ability to do that is significant.

For the first reason (I’ll come back to the second reason), he’s speaking about the kind of long-form thinking achieved through reading books or writing essays or investigating complex problems. There is a lot of chatter on the internet right now about what AI means for human cognition: Is ChatGPT making us stupid? - The Conversation, When AI thinks for students: The silent erosion of critical thinking in classrooms - The Guardian, ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study - The Times. What happens when more and more people depend on AI?

What kind of thinking are we talking about?

The AI of now has the ability to recall, look up, read information across domains almost instantly as well as answer analytical questions about them. It can write summaries, essays, and code as well as test and revise them. It can have conversations with people in different languages and be tirelessly engaging. When we use AI, we can skip the effort to do the research and synthesis. We can skip the initial writing whether words or code, maybe even forgo writing altogether. It seems we also no longer need to learn other languages.

Setting aside the current technical problems with AI (hallucinations, errors in complex tasks, sycophancy) and the massive social implications of AI (who owns it, who can afford to use it, the environmental cost… which too be frank is a bigger threat and deserving of a different article) what do we lose when we let AI do the work? Before we get into the drawbacks, I want to start somewhere else. Throughout history haven’t we outsourced our thinking several times, so is this different?

Here’s two famous stories.

Socrates on the dangers of writing

The first comes from the famous Greek philosopher Socrates (via Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, 274c–275b1) who criticized the use of writing. Socrates tells Phaedrus an Egyptian myth about the god Theuth who presented the gift of writing to King Thamus claiming it to be an “elixir of memory and wisdom.” King Thamus disagrees saying that writing will produce forgetfulness in those who learn it, because they’ll stop exercising their memory and rely on external marks instead. Worse, Thamus argues, people will absorb many ideas without truly understanding them, gaining the appearance of wisdom rather than the thing itself. And there is a deep truth to it. Oral traditional cultures required people to develop prodigious memories and practice in discussing and debating ideas. Today I can barely remember what I’m doing the next day. But of course, we now have access to a larger pool of knowledge than could ever be contained in oral stories. In fact, we can only access Socrates’ wisdom through Plato’s writing.

A bicycle for the mind

The other story is about how Steve Jobs referred to a computer as a “bicycle for the mind”2. He had read about how man was not very efficient at getting around on its two feet in comparison to most other animals, but a man+bike was more efficient at moving than any other animal (presumably given a decent trail). Jobs was quoted as saying “We think we’re basically fashioning a 21st century bicycle here which can amplify an inherent intellectual ability that man has and really take care of a lot of drudgery to free people to do much more creative work.”

And sure enough a computer has been a powerful cognitive assist. As a former engineer, I relied on spreadsheets to do complex calculations, documents to map out designs, databases to track bugs and reporting, and code to operate complex machinery. It allowed me to build, in collaboration with hundreds of other people, millions of lines of code that no one person has even read.

Eroding our connection to reality

On the other hand computers have also narrowed our thinking to a screen. In the world of the internet, we start to believe that the digital bits and bytes are more real than reality. PowerPoint slides become substitutes for actual thinking. Emails supplant face-to-face communication.

It’s not just our memory or rhetorical ability or feel for reality that has eroded. Our society is so specialized that we no longer need to grow our own food or worry about water or sanitation, so we’ve lost some of our self-reliance. We are more dependent on everyone else for survival than ever before. And given the massive amounts of information available to us, we generally accept whatever we are taught or absorb. In other words, culture does the thinking for us.

So this seems to imply AI is very likely to cause us to lose some capabilities but also gain new ones. Still, the pace of change is mind-bending. Since the Industrial Revolution, our societies have been under pressure to adapt. Think how technological prowess has enabled the colonization of the Americas, the devastation of the environment, the wars that have killed countless millions. Change used to happen from generation to generation. Now it seems to be happening decade to decade. What happens when the bicycle for mind becomes an explosive rocket ship? Can we even learn to pilot it quickly enough before we crash it?

Thinking is a manual skill.

Use it or lose it as they say, equally applicable to our muscles as it does to our minds. My son absorbs everything right now, but with each challenge he overcomes, he levels up because striving is what leads to growth. So it doesn’t take too much research to convince me that when AI does the writing and researching for you, the writer learns less, remembers less, and essentially knows less. In the long run, this might mean less ability to innovate.

In Fernandez’s article in The Walrus, he cites a study:

In her seminal paper “Ironies of Automation,” Lisanne Bainbridge observed a striking paradox: as systems became more automated, as operators were removed from routine and repetitive tasks, they became worse at handling scenarios in which those systems failed.3

It makes sense to me that when operators don’t have a solid grounding in how the system works (its causal architecture in other words), they don’t develop the intuitive understanding that enables them to quickly make sense of novel situations and respond. Operators would also be less able to improve the system. Taken to the extreme you can imagine a scenario where humans don’t do any of the work, don’t understand how it works, and therefore cannot innovate.

Experienced non-experts versus actual experts

On the other hand, experts that have done the work of understanding the system can truly use AI as a cognitive assist to accelerate their work. Experts can make a judgment about the quality of the answers returned by the computer in a way a beginner wouldn’t. The biggest distinction may not even be between experts and beginners. It’s between those who are experienced but have settled into routines or habits (the experienced non-expert) and those who are always pushing the boundaries of what they know (the expert)4. The non-expert would use AI to skip the struggle for understanding so that the problem can be solved quickly. The expert would use AI to push their own thinking to tackle greater challenges.

We need to get better at metacognition

We can only guess at the long-term impact of AI, but the consequences may emerge more quickly than the time it took us to understand the impacts of social media. It does suggest that all of us will need to get better at metacognition5 - thinking about thinking - especially if computers can do the routine work faster and better than us. We will need to have a holistic understanding of what healthy cognitive “fitness” is if we are ensure that humanity develops in wise ways. Fernandez gets at with his second reason for why read literature.

And the second, looking to 2030, in a world where that kind of narrow intelligence is abundant, what do we have left? We have our understanding of the human condition and how we appropriate it to be empathic with human beings. Why does literature survive? Because it tells us something about human existence and that’ll help you.

The reality is we have already been outsourcing our thinking. It’s whether we can retain some level of oversight and control of it. Literature, well-written non-fiction or any aspect of culture which connects us with our human story and experience will serve us well. In poker they say “If you don’t know who the sucker is, then it’s you.” In life, if you aren’t doing the thinking, someone else is doing it for you.

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When you look inward are you discombobulated?

Thoughtful and caring people are distracted, distanced and discouraged. The tragedy is that we need thoughtful, caring people stepping into the challenges facing communities, nations and the world. We need people with a clear-eyed focus on diagnosing problems, tackling solution space and designing paths forward that reduce ignorance and error, suffering, waste and injustice.

Before we get to the antidote, and we will, let’s get granular on all the ways humans are being ‘dis’ed.

Disaster: Sudden catastrophes like floods, fires, and hurricanes often come to mind initially. Pandemics, industrial accidents, and structural failures are also major disasters.

• Disputes: Researchers in Sweden have recorded that 2025 saw the highest number of conflicts since WWII.1

• Disinformation: The intentional spreading of false and misleading information to create chaos. As opposed to misinformation where the spreader is perhaps making an honest mistake. Social media is a playground for bad actors spreading disinformation.

• Distrust: Trust is a judgment that whatever or whomever is relied on will perform as expected and won’t fail. We’re having a hard time these days figuring out what is actually trustworthy. Politicians especially are playing fast and loose with the truth. Some experts say we are experiencing an epidemic of political lying.2

• Disorder: Disorder is when something doesn’t work as it is supposed to function and it can result in a great deal of insecurity. When major systems are disrupted there can be unpredictable unintended consequences in the long-run.

• Dispossession: Whether due to conflict or climate change people are being forced to flee whether temporarily or permanently. In some cases it goes further. Dispossession is the systemic stripping of property and other legal rights. It is an extension of the exploitation of human beings and their agency.

• Disparity: The world just acquired its first trillionaire. In 2025, the top 0.1% of the population earned as much income as the entire bottom 50%.3 But disparity isn’t just about money, it is also about resources and power. Forces of oppression take advantage of those vulnerable to exploitation and undermine their ability to survive and thrive.

• Dissatisfaction: Mental health is linked to overall life satisfaction. A 2026 report shows that rates of depression and anxiety among Canadians is stabilizing but their ability to manage and bounce back has declined. 4

If you’ll allow me one ‘dys’, let’s talk about the result of all this: dysfunction. A core function of living is having capacities to see and manage threats and opportunities in the environment. We call this Adaptive Positioning. All life is adapting, but the human species is unique in that it has a deep cultural pool of resources to innovate from. We can learn from the best of the worst of human history and create new ways of living that better address the challenges of our time.

Our biggest existential threats are happening at a geopolitical and planetary scale. We can’t all directly act on this scale but we have agency to influence it. We should be highly concerned about how our leaders see and manage these threats.

How are they developing their capacities for understanding the situation and learning what could or should be done about it? What is their sense of caring and responsibility that they bring to the challenge? What and who is influencing their priorities – is it greed and power or is it sustaining humanity and life?

So why can’t we hold our leaders to account? There are a number of factors, some having to do with our own behavioural wiring and some that are more systemic. They are interrelated and need some untangling. Here is a range of the reactions to grappling with our human predicament.

• Distressed: Many people in the world are too stressed about keeping food on the table to be able to pay attention to larger issues. This is understandable given the levels of disparity and rising cost of living.

• Disinterested: For many people they are genuinely not interested. Perhaps they are more focused on their specialized expertise. That could be a great thing if they are contributing to the flourishing of human beings, like growing regenerative food but it could also be harmful if their specialty is financial con artistry.

• Disoriented: Beyond just feeling lost, some people are orienting themselves to some very strange things these days. People want a story that explains what is going on and there are a lot of stories that are unhelpful. Conspiracy theories for example, tend to have a thread of truth that trick people into trusting them but end up leading them far astray. In other ways, some people are orienting themselves in very narrow ways, focusing only on themselves or their family. Some are orienting themselves to the nation in potentially dangerous ways. This is the root of nationalism.

• Dissimulation: This the act of hiding, masking, or camouflaging one’s true feelings. It is staying shallow and having a lack of authenticity. Think of Neil Postman’s concept of ‘amusing ourselves to death’. Dissimulation can be linked to a surface level obsession with beauty or celebrity.

• Dismissive: Treating the thoughts and ideas of others as unimportant. Exacerbated by algorithms, we tend to only listen to ideas that reinforce our beliefs. It takes effort to understand other’s thinking but this is where we can break down polarization.

• Disturbed: What we are seeing in the world is truly horrific and this is an appropriate response. Through the majority of human history we rarely saw life-threatening images. Now we see them tens or hundreds of times a day through smart phones, entertainment and newsfeeds.

• Disillusioned: The root of cynicism, this is the feeling of disappointment that something didn’t turn out as good as you thought it would.

• Disempowered: Power is the ability to make change happen. In many ways, it feels like efforts to make wise judgements, think independently, and build skills for life challenges are being undermined.

• Disengagement: The feelings can compile and disconnect us. We detach from involvement in the world and, at worst, disconnect from reality. We avoid stepping into the challenges of life.

• Dispirited: People can experience a loss of meaning. They may ask questions like “what is it all for?” Humans need a sense of how their lives fit in the bigger picture. Staying connected to what it means to be alive and human is vital.

These are all understandable responses but they should not be places to dwell. They each have the potential to stop learning and action. To move past them, there are two vital ‘dis’es that we should be cultivating to keep us from being too sucked into the patterns above and to empower ourselves and our own communities to make positive change.

• Discovery: One of the most important things we can do is to pay attention to the voice that says “We can do better.” Whether it’s an article you come across, a colleague in a meeting, or a voice in the back of your head. But knowing we can do better is a long way from actually doing better but it is the necessary kernel from which change actually happens. Figuring out what to do takes more discovery. This includes assessing what we think is happening, what could or should be done and how we can prepare ourselves to respond. The breadth and depth with which each of these steps is explored indicates the quality of the judgement and promisingness of the action that will come from it.
  

• Discipline: This is foundational for the development of good judgement. To move forward as a society we need individuals striving to understand their powers and capacities and how they are fitting against life challenges. Do we have the skills to truly address what we are facing? If not, how would we go about developing them? Disciplined inquiry helps us to identify flaws in thinking and action and better prepare ourselves to deal with the situation. There are forces that seek to undermine those capacities but, in any situation, we can choose to use our agency and prepare ourselves and those around us to better meet what lies ahead. What capacities do we need to build? The list above gives us the answers. We need to cultivate their opposite. In the face of disconnection we need connection. In the face of disinformation we need to be informed. In the face of disempowerment, we need empowerment.

Human Learning Ecology is the discipline of studying the complex ecology of influences that tell us what to think, value, prioritize, believe and do. By looking at a wide range of human achievement and failure, we can discover the underlying causes of adaptive and maladaptive development in individuals, organizations, societies, and cultures.

In this discipline, etymology (the study of the origin and evolution of words) is a rich source to uncover human meaning making. Let’s jump back to the word ‘disaster’ which has latin roots meaning ill-starred. The word seemed to originate in the 16th century when people blamed the stars for ill fortune. It was a time when humans were more likely to believe that disaster was by fate or in the hands of the gods and there was nothing we could do about it. Today, we don’t carry that same meaning of the word. For the most part, we know the reasons why disasters occur. We know that we can use foresight to prepare for or even prevent disaster. And there’s a whole body of knowledge around disaster response.

Looking at these ‘dis’es, what stands out to you most? What does that tell you about the world and how well prepared we are for the challenges ahead?