The Calculator Moment of Thought
In the past ten days, my rate of information intake exploded. Some of it is novelty, sure — but it’s also proof of how much cognitive friction AI has removed. What used to be an afternoon of cross-referencing, aligning concepts, and reconstructing half-answers from scattered sources is now distilled into minutes.
Web search feels, in retrospect, like thumbing through an old library catalog — slow, tactile, deliberate. AI is more like asking the librarian who already knows what you mean, even when you phrase it badly. The efficiency is unparalleled.
But I can’t help asking: was that old friction actually wasted effort?
Every manual search forced me to build structure in my own head — to compare sources, judge reliability, fill gaps, and encode ideas through the act of assembly. It was thinking disguised as searching. Now, with the assistant reasoning for me, I skip straight to synthesis. That’s wonderful for productivity, but risky for cognitive sharpness.
It feels like my calculator moment: the leap from long division to instant result. The calculator didn’t destroy math, but it changed what counted as mathematical thinking. Likewise, AI won’t erode reasoning — unless I stop exercising it.
So the new skill isn’t recall or search anymore. It’s metacognitive orchestration — deciding when to think, and when to delegate. Sometimes I’ll ask for full reasoning paths, not just answers. Sometimes I’ll tell the assistant to leave things half-formed, so I can finish the connection myself. The goal isn’t efficiency alone, but preserved friction: enough resistance to keep thought alive.
Part of the ongoing Metacognition series. Co-written with GPT-5, during another round of delegated introspection.