For most of my life, I had a pretty good sense of direction. I could get in the car, head to a new city, and somehow manage to find my way around without a woman with a British accent calmly telling me when to turn, where to exit, or how to reroute around traffic. I remembered landmarks. I paid attention to exits. I built mental maps in my head. If you told me to turn at the old gas station or take the second road past the church, I could usually figure it out.

Now? I rarely go anywhere without my phone giving me step-by-step driving instructions. I no longer study routes before leaving. I rarely remember street names. If my phone dies or loses signal, I suddenly feel helpless in places I should know well. Somewhere along the way, I outsourced my sense of direction to a machine.

And the troubling part is that I can feel the difference. A skill I once used regularly has slowly weakened from disuse. That same thing may be happening to our ability to think critically and analytically.

As generative AI tools become increasingly integrated into everyday life and legal practice, there is growing concern about what psychologists and researchers call “cognitive offloading.” Cognitive offloading occurs when we transfer mental tasks that we once performed ourselves to external tools or technologies. Calculators changed the way we perform arithmetic. Search engines changed the way we remember information. GPS changed the way many of us navigate the world.

Now AI may be changing the way we think.

Researchers have already found that habitual GPS use can negatively affect spatial memory and navigation ability. A 2020 study published in Scientific Reports found that people who relied heavily on GPS navigation performed worse on tasks involving spatial memory and navigation. Other research has suggested that long-term reliance on navigation aids may impair the brain’s ability to encode geographic information into memory.

The concern is not that GPS is evil or that AI is inherently harmful. These technologies are incredibly useful. The problem arises when convenience slowly replaces effort. The human brain works much like a muscle. The abilities we regularly use tend to strengthen. The abilities we stop using often weaken over time.

That matters for lawyers because our profession depends heavily on critical thinking, analytical reasoning, judgment, and problem solving. Those are not incidental parts of the job. They are the job.

Generative AI can already draft emails, summarize depositions, outline arguments, write briefs, and answer legal questions in polished prose. Used appropriately, these tools can improve efficiency and reduce administrative burdens. But there is also a temptation to let AI do too much of the cognitive heavy lifting.

Why wrestle with a difficult issue when the AI can generate an answer in seconds? Why carefully analyze a case when a chatbot will summarize it for you? Why struggle through the process of writing when the machine can produce something that sounds sophisticated almost instantly?

Because the struggle itself is often where the thinking happens.

Critical thinking is not merely the ability to recognize a good answer when you see one. It is the process of evaluating facts, spotting weaknesses, testing assumptions, weighing competing arguments, and exercising judgment under uncertainty. Those skills develop through repeated mental effort.

If lawyers increasingly outsource those processes to AI, there is a legitimate concern that our own analytical abilities may gradually weaken from lack of use. There is another danger. AI systems are designed to generate fluent and confident responses. That fluency can create the illusion of accuracy. Studies on automation bias have shown that people often place excessive trust in computer-generated outputs, even when those outputs are wrong. Over time, habitual reliance on AI may reduce skepticism, vigilance, and independent verification.

For most of my life, I had a pretty good sense of direction. I could get in the car, head to a new city, and somehow manage to find my way around without a woman with a British accent calmly telling me when to turn, where to exit, or how to reroute around traffic. I remembered landmarks. I paid attention to exits. I built mental maps in my head. If you told me to turn at the old gas station or take the second road past the church, I could usually figure it out.

Now? I rarely go anywhere without my phone giving me step-by-step driving instructions. I no longer study routes before leaving. I rarely remember street names. If my phone dies or loses signal, I suddenly feel helpless in places I should know well. Somewhere along the way, I outsourced my sense of direction to a machine.

And the troubling part is that I can feel the difference. A skill I once used regularly has slowly weakened from disuse. That same thing may be happening to our ability to think critically and analytically.

As generative AI tools become increasingly integrated into everyday life and legal practice, there is growing concern about what psychologists and researchers call “cognitive offloading.” Cognitive offloading occurs when we transfer mental tasks that we once performed ourselves to external tools or technologies. Calculators changed the way we perform arithmetic. Search engines changed the way we remember information. GPS changed the way many of us navigate the world.

Now AI may be changing the way we think.

Researchers have already found that habitual GPS use can negatively affect spatial memory and navigation ability. A 2020 study published in Scientific Reports found that people who relied heavily on GPS navigation performed worse on tasks involving spatial memory and navigation. Other research has suggested that long-term reliance on navigation aids may impair the brain’s ability to encode geographic information into memory.

The concern is not that GPS is evil or that AI is inherently harmful. These technologies are incredibly useful. The problem arises when convenience slowly replaces effort. The human brain works much like a muscle. The abilities we regularly use tend to strengthen. The abilities we stop using often weaken over time.

That matters for lawyers because our profession depends heavily on critical thinking, analytical reasoning, judgment, and problem solving. Those are not incidental parts of the job. They are the job.

Generative AI can already draft emails, summarize depositions, outline arguments, write briefs, and answer legal questions in polished prose. Used appropriately, these tools can improve efficiency and reduce administrative burdens. But there is also a temptation to let AI do too much of the cognitive heavy lifting.

Why wrestle with a difficult issue when the AI can generate an answer in seconds? Why carefully analyze a case when a chatbot will summarize it for you? Why struggle through the process of writing when the machine can produce something that sounds sophisticated almost instantly?

Because the struggle itself is often where the thinking happens.

Critical thinking is not merely the ability to recognize a good answer when you see one. It is the process of evaluating facts, spotting weaknesses, testing assumptions, weighing competing arguments, and exercising judgment under uncertainty. Those skills develop through repeated mental effort.

If lawyers increasingly outsource those processes to AI, there is a legitimate concern that our own analytical abilities may gradually weaken from lack of use. There is another danger. AI systems are designed to generate fluent and confident responses. That fluency can create the illusion of accuracy. Studies on automation bias have shown that people often place excessive trust in computer-generated outputs, even when those outputs are wrong. Over time, habitual reliance on AI may reduce skepticism, vigilance, and independent verification.

The solution is not to avoid AI altogether. Few lawyers are going to abandon these tools, nor should they. The better approach is intentional use. Lawyers should use AI as an assistant, not a substitute for thinking. Use it to brainstorm, organize, summarize, or identify issues. But you should continue doing the difficult analytical work yourself. Otherwise, we may eventually discover that the convenience of having machines think for us came with a cost. We slowly lost the ability to think critically and independently for ourselves.