Is AI Making Us Lazy?

or making us superheroes?

Every leap in automation—steam engines, washing machines, calculators—sparked the same worry: Will new tools dull the human edge? AI raises the stakes because it automates and compresses cognitive effort like never seen before. One prompt drafts a pitch deck, another routes the evening commute. Minutes become spare hours our grandparents never dreamed of saving.

The “Yes, We’re Getting Soft” Column

• Cognitive off-loading Forget phone numbers, spelling, even way-finding. Google Maps replaced street memory the way auto-spell replaced the dictionary, shrinking our daily mental “reps.”

• Lower activation energy One prompt now drafts the memo, debugs code, even outlines a strategy deck. When the hurdle disappears, so does the incentive to practise the underlying craft: finesse, logical structuring, or first-principles troubleshooting.

The “No, We’re Leveling Up” Column

• Productivity-enabled well-being Automating drudge work frees hours for workouts, side hustles, or simply sleep. Burnout drops; holistic output rises. You can finish 8 hours of work in 1 hour and spend the remaining 7 practicing violin, that you always wanted to do.

• New skill frontiers Prompt engineering, multi-modal tool chaining, and ruthless fact-checking are 2025’s version of long division—still hard, just different. Calculators didn’t kill math; they pushed us up Bloom’s taxonomy.

Big Picture: Where the Saved Hours Go

Automation frees time—but what you do with that surplus is the real test.

We’ve been here before. So many times.

When washing machines cut weekly laundry sessions from half a day to half an hour, many women redirected that dividend into education, paid work, and activism—fueling everything from micro-businesses to suffrage campaigns.

Contrast that with assembly-line fast food.

In the 1950s, McDonald’s “Speedee Service System” automated short-order cooking. Families no longer spent an hour prepping dinner; they grabbed a 30-cent burger in five minutes. Yet the liberated kitchen time rarely flowed into night classes or community work. It flowed into more television, larger portion sizes, and—over decades—a public-health crisis visible on every obesity chart.

If AI drafts your slides in ten minutes, those reclaimed minutes can bankroll a side project, a new skill, or even a startup. Or you can doom scroll through Twitter and Instagram throughout the day (and night).

More Automation = More hustle?

Things can also go completely orthogonal from here. Work compression creates more work. The darker outcome: your AI co-pilot empties the inbox at 2 p.m.; your manager refills it by 2:05. Same hours, higher cognitive load—laziness flips to forced hustle culture. Burnouts are much worse than earlier.

So… Lazy or Leveraged?

Whether AI breeds couch potatoes or high-leverage polymaths hinges on one choice: How do you reinvest the dividend and how your context (team, org, clients, family) expect you to spend that dividend.