For a while now, I’ve been exploring a set of related observations about what artificial intelligence seems to be doing to human thinking. I’ve written about what I call anti-intelligence, the growing gap between fluency and comprehension. I’ve described borrowed certainty, the ease with which we absorb confidence we did not earn. I’ve even argued that human and AI cognition operate on orthogonal axes, not as competitors on a single line, but as fundamentally different modes of knowing.

Each of these ideas captured something that feels real. Yet to me, they still languish in both complexity and ambiguity. I kept wondering about a deeper pattern underneath them, maybe even a unifying mechanism.

Then something struck me. It's based on Einstein's perspective on gravity and how his theory changed the understanding of gravitational force itself. My thesis is that AI isn't simply adding new cognitive tools to our lives. It is actually reshaping the conditions under which thinking itself takes place. It is bending the terra cognita—the cognitive ground on which understanding forms.

Think about what it takes to genuinely understand something complex. You encounter conflicting explanations, and you struggle with confusion longer than you’d like. You try to articulate what you know and discover where it falls apart. You revise your thinking, commonly more than once. The process is a curious constellation of difficulty, struggle, and even joy.

And this friction isn't merely incidental—it's how cognitive depth........

© Psychology Today