You are not
becoming less human.
The work can recede. Your relationship with life does not have to.
“You’re letting AI do your thinking for you.”
The accusation carries an assumption: thinking is something we manufacture, and the effort of manufacturing it keeps us human. Transfer some of that work to a machine, and something essential begins to deteriorate.
There are real questions about practice, dependence, and judgment here. But before calling any reduction in mental labor a loss of humanity, we need to examine the assumption.
We also need to distinguish three things that routinely get bundled together: a process taking place, our awareness of that process, and our ability to perform a particular task.
Your heartbeat offers a useful place to begin. The analogy concerns attention; it does not make a software system as dependable as a healthy heart.
A Process Does Not Require Your Attention to Matter
Your heart circulates blood while you read this sentence. Your digestive system processes food. Your breathing continues without waiting for instructions.
These processes are essential to your existence. Most of the time, they receive none of your conscious attention.
Their absence from your awareness tells us nothing about their importance. It tells us that something important can be handled without becoming the main event of your conscious life.
Now consider food.
For many people living in modern food systems, obtaining dinner involves visiting a grocery store or placing an order. They do not locate an animal, track it, kill it, preserve it, and defend it from other hungry animals.
The work still happens. Agriculture, transportation, refrigeration, and distribution carry much of it.
Human attention has been released from some of the work required to keep a human being alive.
I call this absorption: a necessary function continues while its demand on your attention recedes.
Automation transfers execution. Absorption releases attention.
A system can automate a task and still require you to watch it constantly. Absorption occurs when it works reliably enough that you can turn toward something else.
Notice What Happens When You Think
We speak about thoughts as possessions.
“My thought.”
“My idea.”
“I came up with that.”
But examine the experience itself.
You struggle to remember someone’s name. You stop trying. Later, while washing a dish, the name appears.
You work on a problem without finding a solution. During a walk, a connection becomes apparent.
A memory enters awareness. A melody arrives. A sentence takes shape.
You encounter something.
This is the starting point for my philosophical approach to thinking as perception. We perceive a thought somewhat as we perceive a sound: something becomes present in experience, and we can attend to it.
That does not establish that thoughts originate outside the brain. Nor does it reduce every form of reasoning to passive reception. We deliberately compare, rehearse, calculate, and revise.
It does challenge the picture of a conscious little manufacturer who personally assembles every thought before allowing himself to experience it.
Much of what we call thinking becomes available to awareness without our witnessing its construction.
Conscious effort and the occurrence of thought are different things.
What an appearance cannot tell us
Imagine a sphere passing through a flat world.
The inhabitants can perceive only the sphere’s intersection with their plane. A point appears. It becomes an expanding circle. The circle contracts, becomes a point, and disappears.
The sphere has continuity that the inhabitants cannot perceive directly.
This imaginary crossing offers an analogy for the experience of a thought: something appears, occupies more of our awareness, and eventually recedes.
The analogy does not prove that thoughts inhabit an extra spatial dimension. It illustrates a more modest point: the appearance of something in awareness does not necessarily reveal the process that produced it.
An idea can feel sudden even when the conditions for recognizing it have been developing for years.
We should be careful about building an entire theory of human decline on an incomplete picture of how thinking feels.
What Happens Below the Line
Imagine a horizontal line.
Above it are the things currently demanding your conscious attention.
Below it are the functions proceeding without requiring that attention.
Your heartbeat usually remains below the line. An unusual pounding can bring it above the line immediately.
Food supply can remain mostly below the line while the grocery store is stocked. A prolonged disruption changes that.
The position of the line is not a ranking of importance. It marks what currently requires your participation.
As more functions become reliable, more can operate below that line. Attention becomes available for other concerns.
That availability does not guarantee wisdom. Someone can spend it studying, caring for a child, arguing online, or watching another video.
But a reduced demand from one task does not, by itself, demonstrate a reduced human being.
Why reliability can become quiet
In the framework I call the Reality Equation, I express reality as the relationship between actual and expectation:
R = A / E
For a positive, comparable actual and expectation, a match gives us a ratio of one.
I then use:
S = ln(R)
The natural logarithm gives us a useful mathematical feature: when actual matches expectation, ln(1) equals zero.
A tenfold excess gives approximately +2.3. A tenfold shortfall gives approximately −2.3.
Both represent substantial departures from expectation. The magnitude matters even though the signs differ.
My model proposes that the magnitude of such departures helps explain the demand for attention. The sign distinguishes excess from shortfall; it does not rank one as inherently more attention-worthy. A welcome surprise can capture us. So can an alarming failure.
The logarithm’s properties are mathematical facts. Applying this relationship to human attention is my proposed explanatory model; the equation alone does not establish a universal law of neuroscience.
Its practical insight is accessible without advanced mathematics: something can become less demanding of attention because it is working as expected.
Your circulation does not become less valuable when you stop noticing it. Its reliability allows your attention to participate elsewhere.
That is the possibility absorption presents.
Ideas still have people
Absorption does not leave a person without a relationship to ideas.
Someone says AI threatens human dignity. Another says it expands human freedom. Each encounters the same technology through a different expectation.
Those expectations shape what becomes surprising, threatening, or promising.
In my fuller model, expectation includes both prediction and our orientation toward ideas. What you expect depends partly on the ideas with which you are aligned.
This is what I mean when I say, “Ideas have people.”
An inherited idea can organize your attention long before you recognize its influence. You can experience an assumption as obvious reality.
Recognizing that influence gives you something to examine. It does not remove your responsibility for what you endorse or do.
AI can introduce unfamiliar patterns, objections, and possibilities into that examination. What you encounter changes. Your participation continues.
Skill Loss Is a Specific Question
There is a legitimate concern here that deserves precision.
People can fail to develop a skill when they repeatedly bypass the practice required to learn it. AI does not exempt us from that.
A 2025 experiment published in PNAS, involving nearly a thousand high school mathematics students, found that access to a general AI interface improved performance during practice but reduced subsequent performance when the AI was removed. A tutor designed to protect learning largely mitigated that negative effect. The design of the interaction mattered.
That is evidence about learning under particular conditions, measured over a short period. It supports deliberate choices about what we want people to practice. It does not settle the long-term consequences of every form of AI use.
It does not establish that every absorbed task diminishes human intelligence.
For someone learning mathematics, working through a problem can be the purpose of the activity. For someone allocating supplies, completing the calculation accurately can serve a different purpose.
The same operation occupies a different place in each person’s life.
We need to identify the capability we want to preserve, the practice that sustains it, and the outcome we are trying to achieve. “Brain rot” collapses those distinct questions into an accusation.
Software as circulation
Consider someone who has never written code.
That person already has needs that software could address: coordinating appointments, reconciling orders, noticing a missed commitment.
Historically, turning those needs into working software required expertise, money, or a willingness to accept whatever an existing application provided.
AI creates another route toward making software fit an individual life.
The important comparison for that person begins with what they could previously accomplish.
Could they build the system at all? Can they now obtain a useful result? Does it work reliably? Does it recognize when their attention is needed?
Code quality matters because failures matter. Reliability, security, and maintenance remain part of making the function dependable.
But the human consequence reaches beyond a contest between programmers.
Software can become more like circulation: a supporting function that carries necessary work through a person’s life without requiring that person to become an expert in its internal operation.
A missed appointment surfaces. A routine reconciliation completes. An exception calls for judgment.
That requires more than a reassuring interface. Someone must establish what counts as a correct result, how failures become visible, and when human review is necessary. A system that silently makes consequential mistakes has not earned the right to recede.
The person attends where participation is needed.
What deserves the room?
The amount of mental labor required to operate your surroundings is a poor measure of your humanity. Effort can develop a capability you value. It can also be the friction that keeps you from using one.
You can spend an entire day wrestling with administrative machinery and never reach the conversation, investigation, or act of care that mattered to you.
Absorption creates room. What occupies that room remains consequential.
A person whose routine work has receded can still encounter a difficult idea, recognize another person’s distress, question a cherished assumption, or pursue something no one asked them to pursue.
Those activities can demand more attention, more judgment, and more courage than the tasks that previously consumed the day.
The work below the line supports the life above it.
As more becomes absorbed, the question becomes increasingly personal:
What is worthy of the attention now available to you?