The term ‘cognitive offloading’ precedes the current generation of AI products. It was coined in a paper written in 2016 by Evan Risko and Sam Gilbert. In that paper, the term referred to the externalisation of reasoning and memory, including practices as advanced as using Internet search engines to find answers to questions, or as basic as tying knots in handkerchiefs to remind yourself that you have something to remember. It suggested that, although the practice has been around as long as humans have been able to manipulate their environment, offloading cognition could impair the ability to reason and remember, or be responsible for more subtle effects, such as undermining people’s confidence in their own thought and memory. The paper concluded that more research was required, particularly into metacognition: the practice of thinking about thinking.

Ten years later, the need for that research seems even more pressing. We have more tools on which to offload our cognition, and more people who are using them to do just that. Sometimes this offloading is explicit and deliberate, such as when somebody asks an LLM-based product to produce a business strategy or write an essay. But sometimes it is implicit and incidental, such as when somebody asks such a product to draft an email or summarise a document for them. They might think that they are merely offloading the work of typing or scanning mundane verbiage, but their choice means that there are thoughts that they will not think.