Beyond Efficiency: The Cost of Outsourcing Our Thinking

Last semester, one of my friends, who adjuncts at a local college, told a story about how he pulled one of his students aside after reading an essay that didn’t quite sound like him. The tone seemed too polished and robotic. The structure came across symmetrically predictable. It eventually came out that the young man had used AI to write the paper. But that wasn’t the part that blew up my brain.

The real kicker? This student had never finished a book throughout his life. Not even one. In school, especially high school, he relied on summaries and online study guides. He learned how to extract the “important parts” without ever reading the whole. Now, with AI, he could generate something even more efficient. An essay that sounded like deep engagement without requiring the struggle of it. That conversation has unsettled me ever since, because I wonder whether stories like this are a preview of our mindless-thinking future.

The Disciplines That Formed Us

For centuries, reading and writing did not merely help us acquire information; they were disciplines that molded our attention, patience, and imagination. Reading books force us to grapple with ideas and beliefs. They require us to patiently engage perspectives that aren’t our own instead of outsourcing the critical thinking that reading demands. Writing forces us towards clarity. It takes time wrestling with an argument to refine our ideas. The slow work forms the person doing it.

Now we live in a moment where both struggles can be bypassed. Not because today’s students are uniquely lazy than other generations before them. Not because today’s technology is inherently evil. But because convenience is powerful—and power reshapes habits long before we notice what we’ve lost.

This tension is not confined to classrooms. It’s showing up in pulpits as well. Recently, my brother-in-law Chris, who’s been pastoring a church in Kent City for over two decades, participated in a debate about whether AI should be used in sermon preparation. To summarize the opposing pastor’s position (whom he debated), AI can serve as a research assistant—organizing ideas, summarizing sources, and helping pastors save time. Whereas Chris expressed caution. One point raised in the discussion struck me deeply: there is a vast difference between reading a summary of what theologian D. A. Carson says from his books and actually reading one of his books. As I reflected, I realized that:

A summary delivers conclusions. A book delivers argument, nuance, tension, and depth. A summary informs the reader, but an entire book helps form the reader.

That distinction is not trivial. It reveals what is at stake.

Every Revolution Expands Power

Every previous technological revolution has expanded human capacity. But each has also required re-evaluating its changes through an ethical grid. When the printing press began mass-producing texts in fifteenth-century Europe, it democratized Scripture and accelerated literacy for the masses. Ideas once confined to the religious and intellectual elites (along with literate noblemen and women), were now accessible to the common person, and it changed the world. The printing press helped fuel the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance, while also reshaping Western culture through a scientific revolution. It also led to more propaganda, inflamed conflict, and magnified corruption in ways that seemed impossible of past generations.

Centuries later, the Industrial Revolution radically transformed human labor. Machines reduced the physical toil of the common worker, increasing productivity beyond the imagination of any generation before. Life expectancy rose. Entire economies shifted. But the same machines that improved life as they knew it also reduced its people to efficient units of production. The early factories were not romantic engines of progress; they were loud, hazardous spaces where twelve- to sixteen-hour shifts were the norm, injuries were common, and children were often part of the workforce. The trade-offs of a prosperous industrial nation came at the sacrifice of exploited laborers. Again, technology did not create the greed that drove worker exploitation; it amplified it.

Then came the Internet. Knowledge once accessible only in libraries now fits in our pockets as a phone. The Church can stream worship across continents. Scripture translations mushroomed. Voices once unheard have found platforms online.

Nevertheless, online distraction is part of the air we now breathe. Many of us check our phones before our feet hit the floor in the morning. Add to that the fact that being angry online has become big business for social media influencers. And graphic and pornographic content is everywhere you look, available at the touch of a button on a scale we’ve never seen before.

In each case, the pattern holds: technology expands power. And for those of us who hold to a Christian worldview, power magnifies whatever already resides in the human heart (Jeremiah 17:9). And ethical reflection almost always lags behind innovation.

When the Tool Begins to Think for Us

However, artificial intelligence feels different. The printing press amplified words and speech. The Industrial Revolution amplified labor. The Internet amplified communication and attention. AI amplifies knowledge itself. It drafts, composes, summarizes, analyzes, and simulates reasoning and intelligence at the push of a button. For the first time, the tool can do all the thinking for us.

And thinking is not merely mechanical. It is formative.

When we learn through reading and writing, we wrestle for clarity; the struggle shapes us. When we interact with a difficult text, our patience deepens. When we draft and redraft essays, our arguments sharpen. While we are tempted to think of these disciplines as inconveniences of time, however, they are part of how character and critical thinking develop, which leads to creative, gripping, and concise writing. If these disciplines are quietly outsourced, what happens to the person whom they would have shaped? That is the question this moment demands we ask. We cannot un-invent AI any more than previous generations could un-invent the printing press, dismantle factories, or unplug the Internet. The trajectory of AI technological development continues to move forward. But the inevitability of its present existence doesn’t mean the inevitability of uncritical adoption.

If history is any guide, every technological revolution requires guardrails. The difference now is that the guardrails we attempt to set for our work or our attention are insufficient. It is also now about our cognitive formation. The question before us is not whether AI will reshape culture. It already is. The deeper question is whether we will shape its use as a responsible steward before it reshapes us into a “digital dementia” state.

The Question Before Us

We need not curse the darkness or panic whenever there is an AI headline predicting a science-fiction-like doom for our future. Nor should we surrender to AI’s convenience, given its efficient but potentially destructive nature. Every age has required men and women willing to think carefully and ethically before adopting powerful tools. Our moment is no different. In Part Two, I will explore what ethical boundaries for AI might look like in practice and offer a case study from my own work at WordEcho, a newly formed worship music publishing business I am in the process of launching that utilizes an AI hybrid to digitally produce worship music I’ve written for churches and personal devotional use. Since artificial intelligence is here to stay, then the question is not whether we will use it, but how. As a half-glass full person, I want to envision AI’s future use shaped by those who can steward AI without forfeiting the gritty formation process we all need for our human flourishing.