When Answers Cost Less than Thought

"Back in the day, a simple fact rang true: understanding required construction. If you wanted clarity, you had to build it from the inside out. You struggled with ambiguity and lived with uncertainty longer than was comfortable. But after all, you were building something. Importantly, this "cognitive building" didn't appear fully formed but emerged brick by brick and thought by thought. That work wasn't a barrier to thought; it was the architecture of thought itself."

"Today, that journey has competition. Artificial intelligence produces structures the same way computer-aided design renders architectural designs. These are not fragments to assemble or clues to interpret. They arrive structurally complete and often persuasive in their accomplishments. And, perhaps more importantly, they integrate seamlessly into our existing mental models. When finality is delivered rather than constructed, something changes in the experience of reasoning. And in today's world, the word easy shares a border with another equally powerful word, cheap. Let's examine this."

"From Construction to Selection When we accept that an answer costs less than generating one internally, cognition changes or adapts. The shift isn't some moral justification but more so as structural. Our minds have commonly conserved effort when lower-cost pathways were available. What's new is the scale and immediacy of inexpensive coherence. For the first time, this structured completion itself can be externalized. Now, coherence can be selected rather than built. Selected rather than built, that's the key distinction."

Understanding historically required internal construction, with clarity emerging through wrestling with ambiguity and assembling insights over time. Cognitive effort functioned as the architecture of thought, and the distance between question and answer shaped judgment. Artificial intelligence now produces structurally complete, persuasive answers that integrate with existing mental models, allowing finality to be delivered rather than constructed. When answers cost less to obtain than to generate, cognitive paths adapt toward lower effort and selection over construction. This redistribution of cognitive cost risks trading fluency for depth. Maintaining depth therefore requires a deliberate choice to expend additional effort and resist effortless, cheap coherence.

Read at Psychology Today