A few months ago I noticed something small: I’d stopped trying to remember phone numbers, then addresses, then the route to somewhere I’d driven a dozen times. None of that felt like a loss in the moment. Each was a perfectly reasonable thing to hand off. It’s only when you add them up that the pattern begins to look like something.
None of this started with AI. We have been outsourcing memory and navigation for years. AI simply extends the pattern into areas we tend to think of as more intimately ours: writing, reasoning, judgement and taste.
It can draft, plan, search, summarise, remember and increasingly act for us. The useful question isn’t whether to delegate. It’s which parts of life improve when we do — and which become poorer because we stop practising them.
The evidence is more concrete than it sounds
In a small MIT Media Lab study, people completed essay-writing tasks with and without AI assistance while researchers measured brain activity. The AI-assisted group showed lower neural engagement and weaker recall and ownership of what they had written. When some participants later completed the task without AI, the researchers found signs of what they called “cognitive debt.”
It is an early study, not a final verdict on what AI is doing to our brains. But it raises a useful question: if a tool repeatedly removes the mental work involved in a task, what happens when we need to perform it alone?
A separate study of over 600 people found that more frequent AI use was associated with lower critical-thinking scores, with cognitive offloading appearing to help explain the relationship. Because the study was observational, it cannot prove that AI caused the difference. The International AI Safety Report 2026 cites it while also stressing that this remains a young area of research.
The sharpest example I’ve found is clinical. One study observed that, after endoscopists began routinely using AI-assisted colonoscopy, their adenoma-detection rate during procedures performed without AI fell by six percentage points. It doesn’t prove that the technology alone caused the decline, but it shows why maintaining unaided capability matters when the stakes are real.
Practice isn’t only how we acquire a skill. It is also how we keep one.
What AI has made possible for me
My own experience is more complicated than “AI saves time.”
At work, I can spend a lot of time frameworking — following a research question further, building an approach or making Excel do something I would never previously have imagined it could do. Sometimes that is an investment: more effort now for a process that will save time or produce better answers later. Sometimes it is simply a very sophisticated rabbit hole when more immediate work needs doing.
But some of the most useful gains have happened outside work. AI has helped me find things happening nearby and further afield, plan days that contain something enjoyable, and turn vague intentions — go somewhere different, make more of the weekend, do something just for me — into things I might actually do.
It has also helped me build LifeTREstyle: holding ideas, finding connections and giving structure to something I might otherwise have struggled to move forward alongside the rest of life.
In those cases, outsourcing hasn’t made my life poorer or made me less capable. It has helped me do more of what I value. The question isn’t only what happens to me if I stop practising this? It is also: what becomes possible because I no longer have to carry every part of it alone?
Some friction develops capability. Some friction merely stops worthwhile things from happening.
A framework, not a ban
I’ve found it useful to sort tasks into three categories, rather than treating every decision about AI as the same decision.
Delegate. Repetitive admin, transcription, first-pass search and the logistical work surrounding something you still intend to experience yourself. These tasks are relatively low stakes, easy to check and involve little capability being lost when you hand them over.
Assist. Drafting, planning, research and building new ways of doing things. AI can extend your capability here, not simply complete a task faster. But you still need to check the output, own the judgement and recognise when greater possibility has become another rabbit hole.
Protect. Final judgement. Difficult conversations themselves, even if AI helps you prepare. Taste and original thought. Important decisions whose consequences you must live with. Time with people you love. And anything where the practice or presence is part of the value: writing to discover what you think, learning a skill you want to retain, or finding your own way through something before asking for an answer.
The test isn’t simply “can AI do this?” Increasingly, it can do almost everything on that list.
The better tests are:
- What do I gain by handing this over?
- What might I lose if I stop doing it?
- Is the effort part of the value?
- Will this create capacity for something I care about — or simply create more to do?
What I’d actually watch for
The clinical example isn’t only a story about endoscopists. It is a story about what can happen to any skill we stop exercising because something else does it faster.
The unsettling part isn’t that capabilities fade; skills have always faded without use. It is that the fading can be difficult to see because the task is still being completed, just not by us.
That is the argument for keeping some friction in our lives on purpose. Not all of it. There is no virtue in doing every repetitive task manually or carrying logistics that a tool could handle perfectly well.
But AI can remove drudgery, extend capability or erode it. The skill is knowing which one is happening.
The point was never to prove you can still do everything yourself. It’s to make sure you still can, on the day it matters — while making room for more of the life you actually want to live.
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