Every technological leap comes with a dose of cultural panic. Today, that panic centers around generative AI tools like ChatGPT, with critics warning that we are outsourcing our thinking—and that our brains are beginning to rot as a result.
They say we’re becoming mentally lazy. That the spark of original thought is dying. That deep reflection, intellectual struggle, and creative tension are being erased by instant answers and machine-written prose.
I understand the concern. But I see it differently.
What if, instead of killing thought, AI is actually freeing us from the tyranny of the known—giving us the space, time, and cognitive energy to explore the unknown?
Let’s be honest: most of what we call “thinking” in today’s knowledge economy is repetition. It’s productivity theatre. It’s filling in templates, recycling formats, repeating patterns. We spend enormous energy drafting emails, summarising articles, preparing reports, or brainstorming within narrow boundaries. These aren’t deep cognitive tasks—they’re mental busywork.
AI handles that now. And it does it faster, better, cheaper.
So the question we should be asking isn’t: Will AI replace our thinking?
It’s: Now that AI handles the repetitive parts, what will we think about instead?
This is a question we’re rarely taught to ask. For generations, human learning has focused on accumulating and applying existing knowledge. Libraries became Google. Google became ChatGPT. The methods changed, but the model remained the same: find what others have thought, and build from there.
Now, that model is collapsing under its own weight. Every answer is a click—or a prompt—away. The real intellectual frontier is no longer access, it’s imagination.
It’s time we shifted from consuming information to creating new mental frameworks. Instead of worrying about what AI knows, we should be thinking about what it doesn’t.
What are the questions we haven’t asked yet?
What are the perspectives we haven’t explored?
What are the problems we haven’t named—because we’ve been too busy churning through the old ones?
This is where human thinking still matters.
AI can remix data. It can predict text. But it can’t imagine a worldview it hasn’t been trained on. It doesn’t dream. It doesn’t suffer. It doesn’t hope. And it certainly doesn’t take moral responsibility.
We do.
This shift is not the end of thinking. It’s the reallocation of thought—from repetition to reflection, from production to possibility.
But that only happens if we choose it. If we continue to hand off not just the “how” of thinking, but also the “why,” then yes—we’ll become mentally passive, and AI will become our mind by default.
But if we use this moment as a cognitive turning point, we might finally give our minds something worthy to do.
So don’t ask whether AI is making you lazy.
Ask instead:
What am I now free to think about—that no machine could ever imagine?
Footnote
This is a short, sharp op-ed version of your original reflection on AI impact on our brains. You can read the full article.
Africa Thinkers 