Don’t blame the tools …

“Calculators made us worse at math.
Autocorrect made us worse at spelling.
Credit cards made us worse with money.
TV made us worse at sitting with our thoughts.
AI risks making us worse at thinking.

Every convenience removes friction.
But friction is what makes us stronger.

Be careful what you make easier.”

That message appeared in a meme on social media. Read it once more before deciding what you think about it. Does it seem true to you?

For many people, the answer will probably be yes. The argument feels sensible almost immediately, which creates a good opportunity to examine something we do every day without realizing we are doing it. A thought can feel completely reasonable before we have actually determined whether it is true.

The problem with the meme is simple: Don’t blame the tools for choices we make in using them.

If I routinely let a calculator perform arithmetic I could do myself, I am choosing not to do that arithmetic. If I later find that I am less proficient without a calculator, it makes no sense to blame the calculator. I chose the convenience repeatedly, and I practiced the skill less often as a result.

There is nothing profound about that example, but there is something important about how easily we can fail to recognize what it means. Most choices involving convenience do not feel consequential when we make them, we’re simply getting something done. After enough repetition, we may stop noticing the choice altogether. The behavior becomes familiar, then habitual, while the tool becomes an ordinary part of how we function.

That is where faulty thinking can enter. When we eventually notice an unwanted result, we can blame the thing we have been using without seriously examining how we chose to use it. We see the tool and the outcome, but our own behavior between them can disappear from the explanation.

That is exactly what happens when someone says autocorrect made him worse at spelling. Autocorrect did what he wanted it to do: it corrected his spelling. If he gradually stopped paying attention because the software would catch his errors, that was a pattern of reliance he developed. He may never have consciously decided to become dependent upon it, but lack of awareness does not turn his own repeated behavior into something the software did to him.

Don’t blame the tools for choices we make in using them.

This does not require condemning convenience. A tool that saves time or effort is doing what a good tool is supposed to do. There is no virtue in refusing useful assistance merely to make life harder. The issue is whether we remain aware of what we are choosing to have the tool do for us.

Psychologists call one aspect of this cognitive offloading: using something outside ourselves to reduce the mental work required by a task. We have always done it. Writing information down rather than memorizing it is cognitive offloading. The practice can improve performance and free mental resources for other purposes. Convenience, by itself, is therefore not evidence that something harmful is occurring.

The responsibility remains with us to decide what we are willing to offload.

That becomes more important as tools become capable of doing more for us. Artificial intelligence can now perform intellectual work that once required considerable time and effort. Someone can use AI to avoid wrestling with a difficult question, accept its answer without evaluating it, and gradually make that his normal way of working. If he does, AI has not chosen intellectual passivity for him, he has chosen to use AI as a substitute for his own thinking.

He could, instead, use the same tool to demand more of his thinking. He could develop his own position first and then test it against objections, investigate weaknesses exposed by AI, or use an AI response as something to evaluate rather than something to accept. The technology is available in either case, what changes is the way the person chooses to use it.

That makes the meme’s final warning particularly revealing. A person can read “AI risks making us worse at thinking,” immediately agree with it, and never examine whether the statement itself assigns responsibility accurately. In that moment, AI has not interfered with anyone’s thinking, the person has simply failed to think carefully about a claim concerning AI.

And that is the larger danger in blaming tools. Misplaced blame does more than produce an inaccurate explanation, it can keep us from seeing the behavior we actually have the power to change.

If I blame a tool for my dependence on it, my attention stays on the tool. If I recognize that I have repeatedly chosen to rely on it in ways I no longer want, I can make different choices. I can decide what I want the tool to do for me (after all, it’s a tool!) and what I still need to do for myself.

There is no need to fear convenience, reject technology, or deliberately make life difficult in order to preserve some imagined virtue in struggle. There is a need to pay attention to our own thinking and behavior.

Use good tools. Enjoy what they make possible. Decide deliberately what place they should have in your life.

And if your own choices in using them produce consequences you do not like, don’t blame the tools.

Scotty