You probably already use AI in everyday life: for texts, research, planning, maybe even for difficult decisions. It works well, and yet a quiet unease sometimes remains. Are you unlearning something you actually want to keep? For example, finishing a thought yourself or writing a first sentence without help.
That is a legitimate question: does AI make us smarter or more comfortable? My answer after 35 years of IT and 15 years of working with people: both are possible. It depends on how you work with it.
Outsourcing or training
The business researcher Michael Gerlich of the Swiss Business School surveyed 666 people of different ages and education levels and published the results in 2025 in the journal Societies. His finding: people who use AI tools frequently score lower on average in critical-thinking tests. As an explanation he names “cognitive offloading”: we leave thinking work to the machine and practise it less ourselves. Younger participants were more dependent on the tools and scored lower than older ones. Higher education, by contrast, went along with better critical thinking, regardless of AI use.
Two caveats belong here. It is a correlation, not proof of cause and effect: perhaps people who already check less critically reach for AI more often. And a single study is not a verdict on “the” AI. I read it as a warning sign, not a ban. It shows where the path can become dangerous.
The mechanism itself is familiar. Whoever always uses the satnav eventually no longer knows their own city. Whoever never does mental arithmetic calculates more slowly. The brain saves what it doesn’t need. That is not weakness but biology. It is a question of habit, and habits can be shaped.
An old worry: Plato and writing
I find it comforting and instructive that we are not having this worry for the first time. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of the Egyptian king Thamus. The god Theuth brings him writing and praises it as a means to more memory and wisdom. Thamus objects: writing will plant forgetfulness in souls, because people rely on external signs instead of remembering themselves. And it conveys the appearance of wisdom, not wisdom itself.
Today we know: writing did not make us dumber. It enabled us to think on the shoulders of others. But Plato had a point. Whoever only copies texts instead of understanding them has the appearance without the substance. That applies to books, to search engines and now to AI. Each time the technology is an amplifier. It amplifies what we do with it: good thinking or comfortable nodding along.
The image of the centaur
After his defeat by the chess computer Deep Blue in 1997, Garry Kasparov brought an idea into play: human and machine play together as a team. It was called “advanced chess” or centaur chess. What it showed was exciting: the decisive factor was not the strongest human or the strongest computer but the better process with which both worked together. Good centaurs knew when to trust the machine and when to question it.
That is exactly what my work is about. Not human against AI, and not a human submitting to AI. But an interplay in which both do what they do best. AI delivers speed, breadth and pattern recognition. You deliver judgement, experience, values and responsibility. For that, though, you have to start with yourself. You’ll find more on this thought in my post Understand Your Own Operating System First. Then Work with AI.
Three rules for good collaboration
From conversations and my own experience, three simple rules have proven themselves:
- Think first, then ask. Write down your own sketch, hypothesis or gut feeling before you ask the AI. Two minutes are enough. Then you compare instead of letting yourself be led. That keeps your thinking in play, and you recognise what the AI really adds.
- Use the AI as a sparring partner, not as an oracle. Don’t only ask “What is the answer?” but “Where is my thought weak?”, “Which counter-argument am I overlooking?”, “Explain this so that I can pass it on myself.” Whoever asks like this trains their thinking instead of outsourcing it.
- Keep the decision and the responsibility. What goes out or has consequences for people, you decide, and in such a way that you can justify it. Before every adoption, ask yourself: would I sign this even if the AI weren’t involved?
Add a fourth, inconspicuous habit: deliberately plan AI-free time. One hour per week in which you write by hand, plan in your head or simply go for a walk and think. As with muscle training: whatever you never use wastes away.
What only you can bring
The better AI gets, the more important becomes a question that no machine answers for you: what matters to me? Which values guide me? How do I recognise that something is coherent, even when it looks perfect on paper? These abilities don’t arise in the prompt but in contact with yourself: in the body, in feeling, in silence.
This is exactly where technology and ancient practice touch for me. Meditation, breathwork and trance have existed in many cultures for thousands of years. They train what becomes scarce in the age of AI: attention, self-awareness and the ability not to follow every impulse immediately. Whoever practises this becomes a better partner for any technology. How stress affects your judgement I described in Stress from AI at Work.
How I accompany you
In my coaching I combine both: the understanding of AI from 35 years of IT and the work on yourself as a psychological counsellor, with breathwork, meditation, hypnosis and clear everyday exercises. Together we look at where you already use AI sensibly, where you outsource, what you’d rather keep yourself, and how you strengthen your own judgement. One-to-one coaching takes place mostly by video and costs from €200 per hour (incl. VAT). More on the Services page and under Coaching in Düsseldorf.
If you like, we can talk in a free intro call about how you can work with AI without losing yourself in the process.
Sources: Michael Gerlich, “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking”, Societies 15 (2025), article 6; summarised by SVEB, February 2026 (summary, in German). Plato, Phaedrus (myth of Theuth and Thamus). On centaur chess: Garry Kasparov, among others in his book “Deep Thinking” (2017).