We find ourselves in a pickle.
When AI seems necessary.
When everyone around you is ramping up productive work with AI agents to perform 5x - 20x the output they used to do on their own, the person who doesn’t participate risks getting left behind. Eventually unable to compete. At least in theory.
But there’s a cost.
The Law of Exercise by psychologist Edward Thorndike states that mental connections are strengthened with practice (the law of use) and weakened when practice is discontinued (the law of disuse). It is the classic cliche: use it or lose it.
The Law of Disuse: Cognitive Offloading and Skill Decay
Mental connections are weakened when they are not practiced or repeated. Human reliance on Large Language Models triggers this half of the law through cognitive offloading:
True mental strength, development, and capacity come uniquely through effort and exercise. If you do not exert a faculty, it naturally atrophies.
When users outsource memory retrieval, structural outlining, or basic problem-solving to AI, they bypass the manual mental exercises required to keep those neural connections strong.
Bottom Line: Whatever skills we lean on AI to do for us, will the very skills that will atrophy and disappear from our society within a single generation.
And so we face the crux: what do we do?
It used to be difficult and challenging to calculate a formula or to synthesize dozens of dense texts or to interpret Old English into modern vernacular. But the act of doing the work made us strong.
Knowing how to do things made us resilient. Those mental muscles maintained capacity. Analytical thinking took place at a pace that we could handle. And at least once upon a time there was no rush to arrive at the conclusion, because no one else was demonstrating a significant advantage over another. It was mental wit versus mental wit. Some challenges expanding over years.
There was a time when the level playing field meant no managerial decisions could be acted upon today. The courier would first have to travel from place to place to hand the message to its intended recipient. Days would pass. Sometimes months. There was a natural unfolding of events. In the meantime, men and women had agency to make decisions as seemed best. After all, one cannot pause reality while waiting for a response.
But today we no longer have to wait. We can get answers instantly. Or very near it.
And while instantly sounds like a blessing, I think we might all reflect back on the very natural languishing of time as a lost blessing we would all like to have back.
There’s a book that was recommended to me back in 2011 by a web designer named Eric. The book’s title is What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly. Rather than viewing technology as passive dead matter, Kelly argues it has its own emergent drives, tendencies, and trajectories . . . similar to how a plant naturally grows toward the light.
In 2011, that idea was preposterous. A computer and a printer and a fax machine have no preference or will to live. They simply performed a function.
And yet . . . for some reason we could never stop or pause invention. It has always been full-steam ahead.
Almost as if technology has a will of its own, refusing to allow humans the chance to rest and reflect, or to simply slow down and enjoy the fruit of their labors.
In 2026, that book no longer sounds far-fetched. In fact, it sounds prophetic. There’s an accelerating trajectory that even the CEOs of major AI companies are warning us about. They simultaneously warn us of the dangers while plowing full speed ahead to do their best to innovate ahead of the competition.
I’m not writing this to tell you what to do. I’m not suggesting you convert to Ludditism (though I also won’t tell you not to).
I’m writing to tell you what Elon and Dario and Sam aren’t telling you:
Every task you hand over to AI will be a skill you lose. And even a handful of skills surrendered makes humanity significantly weaker and more dependent on something that can be wiped out with an EMP or a lack of electricity.
I’m not telling you to do something. But perhaps I’m hoping that you’ll consider whether you’re safer handing over your skills or remaining more self-reliant.
And maybe it’s not a simple Either/Or proposition. Maybe it’s a Both/And. Just know that there IS a proposition. What you do with that is up to you.