What convenience takes away
The brain tends to choose the path of least resistance. That can make an AI assistant appealing when life feels overwhelming, just as scrolling through social media can seem like an easy reward after a hard week. But convenience has a cost when it repeatedly takes the place of thinking.
Frequent AI use can let people skip the mental work that helps form durable neural connections. This is cognitive offloading. If we passively accept information from AI, we may ask fewer questions and feel less resistance—the same qualities that support curiosity and problem-solving. The brain needs effort, including the experience of failure, to strengthen and reshape neural pathways. Repeatedly bypassing that effort may reduce cognitive reserve over time.
Trust can also become automatic. Automation bias occurs when people give more weight to information from systems such as ChatGPT or Claude than to conflicting sources, even a textbook that is right. Automation complacency is the related habit of checking a system’s work less carefully because we suspect it less and trust its accuracy more—even though large language models often give incorrect answers.
The price of a frictionless life
The same bargain applies to personal data. People trade location, contacts and browsing history for conveniences such as free maps, personalized shopping recommendations and easier communication. Many believe their data has no value if they are not doing anything illegal. In aggregate, however, data can be used to influence purchasing habits and political choices, and to predict events in people’s personal lives.
That exchange can be hard to see clearly. People say they care about privacy, yet often accept data collection for an immediate psychological benefit. Behavioral economists call this the privacy paradox. Long, confusing privacy policies and repeated consent requests add to the fatigue: when another pop-up appears, many people click “Accept all” because they feel they have no real choice.
Social networks are designed to encourage dependence, with business models built around keeping people’s attention. AI can also become compelling when it removes the friction between wanting an answer and getting one.
Put the effort back in
Some ways to resist are straightforward: share less information online, turn off location services when you are not navigating, and reject tracking cookies. You can also ask whether a shop where you once bought a T-shirt really needs your full legal name and date of birth.
For AI, the aim is not to reject useful tools but to make their use less automatic. I think that distinction matters: if every moment of difficulty triggers an assistant, we lose not only time spent thinking, but also the chance to build patience and tolerate uncertainty.
Dorber’s advice is to add deliberate friction to a digital environment built to remove it. The tension is that AI’s appeal comes from making effort optional, while some of the abilities we want to preserve depend on choosing effort anyway.
Source: theguardian.com
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