Cognitive enfeeblement by design

Thinking hard is hard. Cognitive misers like us are therefore inclined to seek extreme cognitive assistance : assistance that is ubiquitously available, highly substitutive, and relatively domain-general. Increasingly, we are being offered assistance like this as the default mode of cognition – it is being embedded in the infrastructure of our digital lives. But whatever its merits for adults, providing extreme cognitive assistance to children is pro tanto morally wrong. This is because the cognitive capacities that make a person self-governing are skills: they are built through deliberate, regular exercise and lost without it. Extreme cognitive assistance removes both the opportunities for that exercise and the incentive to undertake it. Maybe this won’t matter: in a future awash with extreme cognitive assistance, maybe persons won’t need or want to think for themselves. But people should decide for themselves how much of their cognitive self-governance to hand over; and doing that requires having the capacity for cognitive self-governance in the first place.