When AI Changes the Shape of Thought

Key points

AI "nudges" our minds into new cognitive postures we never used on our own.

We adapt to its pace and structure, letting it shape early stages of thought.

Once AI "bends" a thought, it rarely bends back.

No surprise, I've been thinking about thinking lately. And it isn’t driven by anxiety about superintelligence or the usual debates about the loss of human agency. This change is harder to name. Something about the presence of AI that nudges our minds into "positions" we rarely adopt with other people. We lean into AI in ways that don’t come naturally. And this very act of thinking in the company of a machine starts to feel, at least to me, like learning a new stance.

For a long time, our thoughts developed from the "inside out" and in the context of a shared human environm