An Australian psychologist warns that frictionless AI tools—from Meta’s new personal agent to everyday chatbots—are training users to outsource thinking. The convenience of large language models can reinforce automation bias, sap curiosity, and atrophy problem-solving by encouraging cognitive offloading. She ties these risks to the attention economy and the privacy paradox, arguing that users routinely trade data for short-term ease amid opaque policies and consent fatigue. Her prescription is pragmatic: minimize data sharing, disable tracking, log out by default, keep AI off phones, delay queries to spur independent work, draft first without AI, and carve out screen‑free time. The aim is to reintroduce “productive friction” to protect cognitive capacity and personal privacy.
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