The Age of Automation: Are We Forgetting How to Think?

Hi everyone,

How was your week? Ours was busy; we just wrapped our 14th DCC Roundtable on LinkedIn automation.

While preparing, I had an awakening. Something I’d been sensing but couldn’t name. And then it hit me: we’re on a more slippery slope than I ever imagined.

I’m not a doomsayer, but I’ve seen this before - moments when disruption demanded our involvement. This one does too… but for how long?

I’ve always admired the builders, those who turn chaos into structure and vision into reality.

I was one once. Then I watched the internet destroy my industry. Not because it had to, but because nobody worked together to stop it.

We used to create systems to help us. Now, we build systems that replace us.

The False God of Efficiency

For a century, we’ve worshipped efficiency. It began as progress, then became an obsession.

We streamlined factories, offices, schools, and eventually, our minds. We engineered predictability and called it progress. In doing so, we stripped away the messy, essential act of thinking for ourselves.

Now, as AI steps in to automate creativity, we’re seeing the endgame of that experiment. The machines aren’t the problem. Forgetting how to think without them is.

The Age of Control

We didn’t set out to kill curiosity; we just wanted to make things work better. Frederick Taylor timed every human motion with a stopwatch. Thorndike turned learning into drills and metrics. It worked, production soared, schools quieted, but we confused order with intelligence.

We built systems that rewarded speed, obedience, and predictability, the perfect formula for machines, not people. When every problem has a “best practice,” there’s no reason to explore. When every question has a “right answer,” curiosity becomes inefficient.

It didn’t feel like control. It felt like progress. Until we realized we’d traded freedom for consistency.

We didn’t mean to kill critical thinking. We just made it redundant.

The Programmable Mind

By the 1940s, we moved from managing motion to managing behavior. Watson and Skinner turned learning into stimulus → response → reward. Condition the mind, and you control the person.

That mindset seeped into everything: work, school, and even parenting. We learned to seek approval, not understanding. To perform, not question. To replicate, not originate.

That’s why so many people look busy but rarely think. We’ve been trained for performance, not perspective.

The Rebellion We Forgot

After two world wars, thinkers like Maslow and Rogers fought back. They argued that humans weren’t machines to be programmed, but beings with potential that couldn’t be measured by output.

Their warning still stands: When you stop thinking for yourself, someone else will do it for you and profit from it. Yesterday’s villains were bureaucrats managing five-year plans. Ours are algorithms managing attention spans.

The battle hasn’t changed, only the tools.

The New Box: AI and the Automation of Thought

The factories are gone, but the factory mindset remains. The stopwatch became the dashboard. The supervisor became the algorithm.

AI promises liberation, but when used unconsciously, it breeds dependence. We’re trading cognition for convenience and calling it progress.

The danger isn’t that AI will replace human intelligence. It’s that it will replace our need to think critically.

Reclaiming the Mind

For decades, critical thinking was taught through the nine-dot puzzle — connect all nine dots with four straight lines without lifting your pencil. The lesson was simple, think outside the box. But that box was still visible. Today’s challenges are built by invisible systems that shape what we see, what we value, and even what we believe. If yesterday’s critical thinking was about connecting dots, tomorrow’s must reveal the systems that create them. 

We don’t need to think faster, we need to think deeper.

We don’t need more information, we need better interpretation.

The new critical thinking requires:

1. Self-awareness, know your biases and blind spots.

2. System awareness, know what’s real vs. hype.

3. Ethical awareness, ask not just can we, but should we.

AI won’t kill critical thinking.

We will, if we keep treating it as optional.

A century ago, we learned to build faster. Now we need to learn to think more slowly. The assembly line gave us productivity. The algorithm gives us convenience. But wisdom? That still takes courage.

Critical thinking isn’t a skill. It’s an act of rebellion.

In a world where outsourcing thought to machines, thinking for yourself may be the most radical act left.

When was the last time you solved a problem without asking an algorithm first? Tell me in the comments, I’m genuinely curious.

For deeper dives on this topic, follow our long-form essays on: 🔗 Medium | Substack

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