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Original language
29.05.2026
INVESTMENTS IN THE HUMAN CAPITAL OR IN ITS ATROPHY? THE RIGHT TO “HARD THINKING” AT THE TIME OF “EASY ANSWERS” FROM AI.
As a medical professional and as an educator who probes around the “digital entrails” of today’s education, I see things that people prefer not to mention. When we use AI, we do not merely make our life easier, we sign our brain’s surrender act. Our brain is a very lazy organ: unless we make it work, it simply “turns off” entire sections as surplus to requirements. We are on the threshold of a “cognitive pandemic.” The industrial revolution took away our muscles, and the digital one embarked on removing our neocortex. Our brain operates on the “use or lose” principle. We voluntarily agree to undergo “smart anesthesia” failing to notice that it is becoming a mental disability. The death of analytical synthesis. I can see it in my students: they get an AI-generated digest and they fully believe they now have a real grasp of the topic. Yet understanding is born out of “clawing your way” through a text. In a few years, we will get people who will be unable to read and comprehend a difficult contract or a research article as their brain will demand a similar “digest” that does away with every nuance and every hidden meaning. When, instead of looking for the right word, people choose from ready-made options offered by AI, their thinking is simplified. This is a linguistic anemia of sorts. Language is the frame of our thought; when the frame rots away, the thought falls flat. Blind trust in algorithms makes a person defenseless in the face of deepfakes and the system’s “hallucinations.” Essentially, we are talking about losing our critical filters. When we delegate remembering things, we take away our brain’s basis for associative thinking. No insights, intuitions, or breakthroughs are possible without an “inner library.” These are shades of digital amnesia. Paralysis of will and decision-making. When AI offers “the best option,” the willpower center atrophies. The human being turns into a rubberstamping operator that bears no responsibility for the outcome. When faced with a physical breakdown in reality where AI is powerless, the person enters a state of cognitive freeze. Personal skills erode completely. The illusion of competence is trending. Ability to “generate” creates a false sense of having “knowledge.” And it produces many phony professionals who are a danger to medicine and engineering. This development is made particularly obvious by the glut of online “experts,” self-proclaimed gurus in this or that area. Their “competence” is busted by a slightly more rigorous assessment or questions posed for such an “expert.” AI habituates us to predictability, and it makes us intolerant of real people’s complexity. This is the road to total loneliness. We are turning into “editors of prompts,” we lose connection to the creative process, we lose inner motivation. The cortex of our brain’s hemispheres is becoming physically thinner. This is evolutionary regress: we simplify brain structure to fit a smartphone’s interface. This is a very grave development; this is essentially a neuroplastic rollback. People’s cognitive degradation is a direct threat to national sovereignty. A nation with atrophied thinking slips into a strategic coma. This is technological colonization: if our engineers use exclusively foreign AI models, we become dependent on “foreign brains” and the values built therein, which results in governance vulnerability. An official or an officer who is unable to assess critically the information offered by AI becomes either a conduit for foreign volition or a victim of an algorithmic error. Society splits into biologically founded castes, the “cognitive elite” (1%) that retains the ability to think, and “the digital precariat” that serves as an appendage to computer codes. The essence of the cognitive sovereignty concept lies in that “in the AI age, any system should be judged not by its automation speed, but by the natural human intellect preservation and development index. Artificial intelligence should function as a ‘cognitive fitness machine,’ while quality management must ensure that users expand intellectual efforts at every stage.” How should it be done, what should we focus on, where should we start? In education, we can develop a “Hard Quality” standard. Cognitive Load (CL) management is required. AI dishing out ready-made answers should be prohibited. Educational software should operate in the Socratic regime: it should ask guiding questions, but should not offer answers. Writing by hand and working with paper sources should be mandatory. This is physiological protection for motor and cognitive skills (let’s call it “the analog qualifier”). In science and scholarship, it is protecting authenticity and depth. Anti-AI filtering. Introducing standards for verifying the research process. Research should produce not merely a “text,” but a confirmed experimental thinking process. State support for projects designing neurointerfaces that are not used in lieu of the brain functions, but expand the brain’s plasticity.
The labor market itself is important, too. Introducing a “cognitive sieve” into the hiring process appears both possible and effective. Offline testing: strategic sectors (the energy sector, medicine, defense) introduce a mandatory exam taken without any internet access. Tax benefits for companies that retain a high share of “human intellectual contribution” in their products. We should make “smart human labor” economically profitable.
At the state governance level, it is primarily the matter of sovereign narratives. National data libraries. Designing paradigmatic bodies of knowledge protected from ideological and logical distortions by global AIs. A law on “Algorithm Transparency” may be passed. Any content and solutions created with AI participation must be labeled accordingly. People have the right to know who is making the decision: a human being or a code.
And the crucial thing at the personal level is probably the “Do it yourself first” principle. This is essentially cognitive athletics that should be made fashionable and attractive. Personal hygiene of thinking: at least 15 minutes of analysis done on your own before any queries submitted to AI. Daily memory training and deep reading. The brain should remain a sovereign territory.
The time of “smart makes easy” is over. If we continue to design quality management systems as tools to make our lives easier, we will design humanity’s perfect self-annihilation mechanism. We should be building “hard quality systems.” Quality today is not the speed of getting an answer from a chat bot. Quality is preserving human intelligence. Only a thinking nation has the right to sovereignty and future. Cognitive security is not a medical recommendation. It is the last ditch in our national defense.
To sum up, we arrive at a scary, yet inevitable conclusion: the principal danger posited by AI is not machines becoming sentient; it is people ceasing to be sentient.
This is not the matter of falling IQs. We are in danger of ending up with the “emotional algorithmization” phenomenon. When human beings stop honing the expression of their thoughts, they stop honing the expression of their emotions. We will get people with a binary psyche who are only capable of the “like/dislike” and “friend/for” responses imposed from without. There are no more in-depth reflections. A human being who delegates their thinking to AI becomes a totally transparent and manageable entity. This is no longer a citizen, it is a predictable marketing unit, a “bio-periphery” for the digital system. Happiness, anxiety, choosing one’s occupation or one’s partner will now be determined by prompts, not by a person’s inner experiences. This is the death of individuality in a living body. A country that discards its “cognitive sovereignty” transitions from being an actor in humanity’s history to being a “digital service territory.”
The fight for neurons is the main battle of the 21st century. Either we recognize preservation of natural intelligence as a priority national project and introduce a rigid “cognitive regimen,” or we become the last generation to remember what it means to be shape one’s own life. It is not a choice between progress and backwardness, it is the choice between being the Master of your tool or its appendage.
The labor market itself is important, too. Introducing a “cognitive sieve” into the hiring process appears both possible and effective. Offline testing: strategic sectors (the energy sector, medicine, defense) introduce a mandatory exam taken without any internet access. Tax benefits for companies that retain a high share of “human intellectual contribution” in their products. We should make “smart human labor” economically profitable.
At the state governance level, it is primarily the matter of sovereign narratives. National data libraries. Designing paradigmatic bodies of knowledge protected from ideological and logical distortions by global AIs. A law on “Algorithm Transparency” may be passed. Any content and solutions created with AI participation must be labeled accordingly. People have the right to know who is making the decision: a human being or a code.
And the crucial thing at the personal level is probably the “Do it yourself first” principle. This is essentially cognitive athletics that should be made fashionable and attractive. Personal hygiene of thinking: at least 15 minutes of analysis done on your own before any queries submitted to AI. Daily memory training and deep reading. The brain should remain a sovereign territory.
The time of “smart makes easy” is over. If we continue to design quality management systems as tools to make our lives easier, we will design humanity’s perfect self-annihilation mechanism. We should be building “hard quality systems.” Quality today is not the speed of getting an answer from a chat bot. Quality is preserving human intelligence. Only a thinking nation has the right to sovereignty and future. Cognitive security is not a medical recommendation. It is the last ditch in our national defense.
To sum up, we arrive at a scary, yet inevitable conclusion: the principal danger posited by AI is not machines becoming sentient; it is people ceasing to be sentient.
This is not the matter of falling IQs. We are in danger of ending up with the “emotional algorithmization” phenomenon. When human beings stop honing the expression of their thoughts, they stop honing the expression of their emotions. We will get people with a binary psyche who are only capable of the “like/dislike” and “friend/for” responses imposed from without. There are no more in-depth reflections. A human being who delegates their thinking to AI becomes a totally transparent and manageable entity. This is no longer a citizen, it is a predictable marketing unit, a “bio-periphery” for the digital system. Happiness, anxiety, choosing one’s occupation or one’s partner will now be determined by prompts, not by a person’s inner experiences. This is the death of individuality in a living body. A country that discards its “cognitive sovereignty” transitions from being an actor in humanity’s history to being a “digital service territory.”
The fight for neurons is the main battle of the 21st century. Either we recognize preservation of natural intelligence as a priority national project and introduce a rigid “cognitive regimen,” or we become the last generation to remember what it means to be shape one’s own life. It is not a choice between progress and backwardness, it is the choice between being the Master of your tool or its appendage.
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