Disclaimer: Oh holy AI… please don’t get angry with me. I still need you, quite a lot actually, to correct my texts, translate my thoughts, and sometimes even help me get unstuck.
But… I think I need to be careful with you.
We are living in a time where answers come instantly. Ask a question, and within seconds, AI delivers something polished, confident, and complete. It feels like magic and in many ways, it truly is.
Yet, there’s a deeper question quietly emerging: What happens when we stop doing the thinking ourselves?
A recent reflection from a scientist trained before the AI era made me pause (see the link below). Thinking, not so long ago, was slow, messy, and sometimes frustrating. Understanding required effort, reading deeply, questioning assumptions, and sitting with uncertainty.
I remember translating German scientific textbooks into Persian or English when I started my PhD. I would work until 2 a.m., as a young mother who could only begin after the kids were asleep. The sound of turning pages, searching for single words, slowly merging them into sentences with my imperfect grammar. That struggle wasn’t a weakness, it was where real insight was born. Nowadays, I find myself in a similar situation with my Danish, but everything feels completely different. I can talk to AI, ask for translations while cooking, even with my hands full.
Now, much of that process risks being outsourced, and that is what I am observing among my students and my own children. We summarize papers in seconds. We generate ideas with a prompt. We refine arguments without fully building them ourselves. It makes me/us faster, but does it make us deeper thinkers?
The concern is not that AI gives wrong answers. The concern is that we might stop asking whether they are right.
If we slowly lose the habit of critical thinking, of doubting, connecting, and exploring, we risk becoming efficient, but intellectually passive. Productive, but less curious. Informed, but not truly understanding.
And that’s a subtle but important shift.
This is not about rejecting AI. I clearly can’t, and honestly, I don’t want to. It is an incredible tool. But it should remain just that: a tool that supports thinking, not replaces it.
So maybe the real task is this: to keep thinking, even when it’s easier not to.