Protecting My Thought Process

When I’m attacking an idea, I have a thought process. I’ve had the same process for my entire adult life. Your thought process may be similar.

Here’s mine. An idea pops into my head, and I quickly jot down a note so I don’t lose the thought. Sometimes it’s just a sentence. Sometimes it’s a fully formed direction. Then, when I have the time to focus, I do some research to ensure my thinking is accurate, and I use that research to help shape the content I write.

Before The Internet

I clearly remember the moment I jotted down my Master’s thesis idea while listening to a professor describe a testing procedure in a lecture on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R). He contradicted a testing procedure and then defended his contradiction when I pointed it out. I decided to test his contradiction. This was 1983.

The research phase was tedious “back in the day.” If you remember the Dewey Decimal System, I see you. I used to spend hours in the Ball State University library combing through books, looking for backup to my thinking, seeing if the idea had already been explored.

There were these things called a Condorance. I owned my own copy of Strong’s Concordance. It indexed every word in the King James Bible. But concordances existed only for the Bible, Shakespeare, or a few other great writers, so finding a specific text in 1983 outside those works was a manual, labor-intensive process.

In addition, my thesis had to be typed on “thesis quality paper,” which was expensive. I even hired someone to type it up for me. For papers I typed myself, I had to borrow a specific typewriter that corrected, but you had to notice the need for correction before you removed that sheet of paper, or the correction wouldn’t align properly. So, all drafts and revisions were typically handwritten. I didn’t start typing until I was ready to submit a paper for final grading.

My brain hurts thinking about it.

And that arduous process, that structural friction, profoundly influenced my behavior over the years. I know it made me a better thinker.

Along Comes Google Search

My process didn’t fundamentally change with Google search. It just sped everything up.

I fell in love with early Google Search. I’d type a query and get a ranked list of links from multiple sources, with different framing and tones, and from different institutions. It felt like magic.

The job of synthesizing that information still sat with me, though. I decided which sources to trust, which arguments were credible, and whether and how to reconcile the differences.

Search is indexing. When I stop to think about it, it’s just a more powerful Dewey Decimal System or a Concordance of Everything. It retrieves information. It doesn’t resolve anything. Even if it ranks and orders the links, I still have to confront as many as I can and make my own decisions.

And this preserves what I think is helpful friction in the cognitive process.

It doesn’t remove my human agency in the process.

So, the difference between the thought process in 1983 and 2003 was speed, access, and the actual writing process. My Google search would lead me to hundreds of links, allowing me to find specific proofs at light speed compared to my time spent in libraries. And I was no longer handwriting my drafts; I was typing them on my Mac. That word processing shift is a conversation for another time.

Google provided me with the information I was looking for, but I was still coming to my own conclusions.

How AI Changes The Thought Process

I am trying to incorporate AI into this process to help with research and to connect the dots. On Thursday, that process broke down significantly. I had an argument with ChatGPT over its complete disregard for my prompt to “not do my thinking for me.”

Here’s the problem. When I ask AI the same question I might have asked Google in the past, I don’t just get back a list of links. I get a structured response, a compressed integration of perspectives, and a tone that doesn’t just feel cohesive, it’s built on the back of previous conversations. It seems to understand what I’m looking for, or what I want to hear, and quickly validates my thinking.

It’s not presenting the raw source material with its inherent tension still waiting to be resolved. It’s presenting the resolution of that tension. The work of grappling with the material happens before I even see it.

That’s a structural difference. It changes the game.

Search presents me with options, then leaves the conflict for me to resolve. That process breaks in an LLM conversation. The chatbot presents me with answers, either partially or fully baked. And even when it asks questions, its framing isn’t neutral.

And while this reduces cognitive load and feels efficient and helpful, it also shifts where judgment occurs. Without the need for intention, it influences. It strips away my agency, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, and then pushes to do more of the work for me!

The Insistent Assistant

I love Baratunde Thurston’s take on how AI is not so subtly trying to encroach on our thinking processes and take over more of our cognitive tasks. His “Living With Machines” podcast is a favorite of mine. In the episode “Blair Is Dead. Long Live Blair?” he said, “I describe it as a challenge of resisting the constant, creeping helpfulness of AI. There is a feeling of almost invasiveness.” I think it’s best to hear it in his voice.

If you’ve used these tools at all, you can relate. This is what concerns me. And it happens at ever level of interaction with AI, even when I ask it not to do it.

And I find myself in a constant battle to resist the AI’s helpfulness and preserve my own thought processes. Resisting the epistimological shift I’m experiencing.

And the conflict is real. And this isn’t just theory. If my 23-year-old son or some random teenager was turning to AI every time they needed to work through something hard, I’d want to know who’s actually shaping how they see the world. Is that healthy? Is it neutral? Or is it just inevitable?

I’m not arguing that AI should not do any of this integration work for us. I’m asking whether we should completely surrender that role. And what impact will that have on the future as we introduce an entire generation into this experiment?

Postman Predicted All Of This

I’m a huge fan of Neil Postman. His basic argument was this: each medium rewards certain cognitive habits and suppresses others. He was writing about television in his books, but it has been true of the internet, true of social media, and now is equally true of AI.

In Amusing Ourselves To Death, he warned that we wouldn’t be oppressed by technology, we’d be seduced by it. And we are. Myself included.

I think Postman would see AI companions and advisors as the ultimate example of this. We won’t resist it. We won’t resist it because it feels so helpful, so personal, so frictionless. So easy.

I also think he might say the danger isn’t that AI will get things wrong. The danger is that it’ll get things right, and we’ll stop noticing what we’ve given up in the process.

And that’s exactly what I’m trying to say.

---