After working with and thinking deeply about AI and what may be coming next, one thing has become clear to me: staying mentally and socially fit while relying on machine intelligence is not something we can leave to others.
Technology providers are in a fierce battle for dominance, racing to make their products as easy and frictionless to use as possible. Organizations are focusing on labor automation and efficiency. Governments are starting to understand that they might have to regulate some of the bigger risks, and even religious leaders are getting involved. Useful, necessary, and probably slower than we would like, given the pace of AI development.
In the meantime, we still have to work, think, learn, decide, collaborate, and stay useful. Today.
The sensible approach is not to resist it, romanticize old ways of working, or pretend that producing “AI-free” work makes us morally superior.
Use it to become faster, more creative, efficient, and better informed. Remove pointless friction and free up time for the work and people that matter more.
But be aware that short-term gains will be followed by long-term pain if we do not nurture and train our brains to stay strong and connected to others.
We are built to avoid friction
The human brain is built to conserve resources. Mental effort costs energy and often feels uncomfortable. Evolution has spent millions of years making sure we avoid unnecessary effort whenever possible. The psychologist George Zipf called this the Principle of Least Effort in 1949.
Add a few familiar human habits: avoiding uncertainty, seeking confirmation, wanting praise, trusting fluent answers, and taking the fastest route when pressure starts breathing down our necks.
Then add years of digital work and social media that have already weakened attention, deep reading, patience, and tolerance for slow thinking.
The result is that AI does not meet the ideal or easy-to-change human user. It meets the actual human system, already under pressure.
The offer is attractive
Work moves fast. Attention is fragmented. Feedback is often weak. People are tired. Many teams still have no clear norms for AI use. Difficult conversations were already difficult before a chatbot offered to make them smoother. Decision-making was already uncomfortable before AI offered a confident recommendation.
Then AI enters with a very attractive offer: fast answers, fluent summaries, polished writing, instant plans, plausible advice, emotional reassurance, and endless alternatives.
This is what makes AI useful. It is also why we need to use it deliberately.
Friction is formative
Mental effort often feels unpleasant across different types of tasks (e.g., with and without feedback), across different populations (e.g., university-educated and non-university-educated), and across continents*.
We do push ourselves, and choose demanding activities such as chess, surgery, writing, research, or serious study. But usually not because the effort itself feels wonderful. We do it because the value, mastery, and competency outweigh the cost.
This is where AI changes the formula. AI can remove effort while still producing output that looks and feels effortful: a summary, a decision, a first draft, a reply to a difficult email, a polished explanation, a list of ideas, a better structure.
But some friction is formative. These are not just tasks. They are reps that keep our brains in shape:
Reading before summarising
Thinking before prompting
Wrestling with uncertainty
Explaining ideas in our own words
Listening properly
Staying calm in a difficult conversation
Giving thoughtful feedback
Repairing trust. Admitting doubt
Asking a better question
Saying, “I may be wrong.”
And if we outsource too many of them, we should not be surprised when the mental muscles weaken. That is where cognitive debt can build: we keep producing the output, but practice less of the capacity needed to judge, explain, and own it.
What future work demands
The human job moves upward: the brain will be asked to do less routine production and more higher-order judgment.
We will be asked to judge quality and know what is missing. To see when an answer is technically correct but contextually wrong. To connect ideas across domains. To ask better questions. To make decisions under uncertainty. To explain trade-offs. To understand people well enough to know what should be automated and what should remain human.
The problem is that these higher-order abilities do not appear magically because we now have better tools. They are built through the very friction AI can help us avoid.
If we use AI to avoid every bit of cognitive and relational effort, we may become faster at producing work while becoming weaker at judging it. And judging the work is exactly where more of our future value will sit.
Small moves to stay sharp and connected
We have started with the awareness side: the AI Work Readiness Pulse helps people reflect on how AI is already entering their work, and what that may mean for their attention, judgment, confidence, responsibility, and connection.
But awareness is only the starting point. The real value comes when people can turn that awareness into action.
That is where our work is going next.
We are building a practical guide and a library of small moves for individuals and teams: simple ways to notice where AI is taking over, decide which human capacity still needs practice, and turn that into one small action inside real work.
Small moves. Real work. Better habits. Practical ways to use AI fully while keeping the important human reps alive.
Some examples:
Before asking AI to draft something important, write three rough bullets yourself.
When AI gives you a polished answer, ask what is missing, wrong, biased, or too confident.
Before accepting an AI recommendation, define your own criteria first.
After AI explains something important, explain it back in your own words.
Before sending a difficult AI-assisted message, ask whether a real conversation is needed.
When you use AI to prepare for a meeting, use some of the saved time to listen better, not just to squeeze in another task.
These are not grand transformations requiring unsustainable levels of willpower. Small moves have a better chance.
The future will need more than just smarter technology. It will need humans with brains and hearts to use it well.
*https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-bul0000443.pdf