The Thinking Person's Guide to Not Thinking About AI

The illusion of thinking indeed.

Every new piece of AI research lands in our collective consciousness not as data to be understood but as ammunition for a culture war that was decided before it began.

We are watching the most sophisticated act of intellectual theatre in recent memory, where every player knows their role, every line is rehearsed and the conclusion was written before the curtain rose. The pattern is so predictable it borders on parody. A technical paper emerges from some prestigious institution. Its title, invariably crafted for maximum impact, promises to reveal what we always suspected: that artificial intelligence is either a fraud, a danger, or both. Within hours, the usual suspects emerge from their digital lairs, brandishing the abstract like a trophy. The headlines write themselves. The op-eds flow like water. The social media victory laps begin before anyone has read past page three.

What we are witnessing is not intellectual discourse but intellectual cosplay. The commentariat performs the gestures of critical thinking while carefully avoiding its substance. They cite methodologies they do not understand, trumpet conclusions they have not verified and declare victories in battles that exist only in their imagination. The speed of their response is inversely proportional to the depth of their analysis. The louder the proclamation, the shallower the understanding.

Consider the choreography of a typical AI panic cycle. First comes the paper with its provocative title, something about illusions or cognitive debt or reasoning collapse. The authors, careful scientists doing careful science, include caveats and limitations that will be promptly ignored. They describe specific experimental conditions that will be generalised beyond recognition. They note preliminary findings that will be cast as eternal truths.

Then come the translators, those who transform nuanced research into blunt instruments. They scan for the most alarming phrases, the most dramatic graphs, the most quotable conclusions. Context is not merely lost but actively discarded. Methodology becomes irrelevant. Alternative explanations are ignored. What emerges is not science but scripture, not analysis but ammunition.

The amplifiers arrive next, each adding their own layer of catastrophising. Where the paper found a specific limitation under specific conditions, the headline writers discover universal failure. Where researchers noted interesting patterns worth further study, commentators proclaim the end of an illusion. Where scientists asked questions, pundits provide answers, always the same answers they provided before they read the research.

The intellectual dishonesty would be stunning if it were not so routine. Studies are celebrated for confirming biases and ignored when they do not. Rebuttals vanish into the void while initial claims achieve immortality. Technical details that complicate the narrative are treated as mere footnotes to the real story, which was always the story the critics wanted to tell.

This is not scepticism. Scepticism requires effort, demands evidence, changes with new information. This is something else entirely: a performance of scepticism that requires only conviction. The critics are not investigating whether AI can reason; they are insisting that it cannot and they will accept any evidence that agrees while rejecting any that does not.

The most revealing aspect is not what they say but what they do not say. When a study's methodology is questioned, they do not engage. When counter-evidence emerges, they do not respond. When their interpretations are challenged, they simply move on to the next panic, the next proof, the next vindication of views they have held since before large language models existed.

We are told, again and again, that artificial intelligence is producing an illusion of intelligence. The irony is exquisite. The real illusion is the one performed daily by those who claim to analyse AI while demonstrating they understand neither artificial intelligence nor intelligence itself. They mistake pattern matching for reasoning when it comes from silicon but celebrate it when it comes from their own synapses. The critique industry has become what it claims to oppose: a sophisticated pattern-matching system that produces predictable outputs from any input. Feed it a paper about AI limitations and it will produce outrage about illusions. Give it a study about cognitive changes and it will generate panic about mental decline. Present it with evidence of capability and it will output dismissal and deflection. The machine is perfectly calibrated to produce heat without light, noise without signal, certainty without understanding.

This is not to say artificial intelligence is without limitations or risks. Clearly there are MANY. Serious researchers are doing serious work to understand both. But their careful investigations are drowned out by the chorus of those who confused volume with wisdom, speed with insight and confirmation bias with critical thinking.

The real cognitive debt is not accruing to those who use AI tools. It is owed by those who have outsourced their thinking to the comfortable certainties of technological pessimism. They perform intelligence while demonstrating its absence, critique reasoning while failing to reason, and demand rigor while practicing its opposite.

We are living through a revolution in how minds and machines might work together, a transformation that demands our most careful thought and deepest understanding. Instead, we get shallow performances from those who mistake their fear for wisdom and their ignorance for insight. They are the perfect critics for our age: quick to judge, slow to think, and absolutely certain about things they do not understand. The tragedy is not that they are wrong, though they often are. The tragedy is that their noise drowns out the signal, their certainty precludes curiosity and their performance prevents the real work of understanding what is happening to us and with us and through us as artificial and human intelligence learn to dance.

The next time you read a breathless takedown of artificial intelligence, ask yourself: Is this analysis or ritual? Is this thinking or theater? Is this intelligence or its illusion? The answer, more often than not, will tell you everything you need to know about the current state of our discourse and nothing at all about the current state of our machines.

We deserve better than this endless performance of intellectual superiority by those who demonstrate only intellectual laziness. We need fewer hot takes and more cold analysis, less certainty and more curiosity, fewer performers and more thinkers. Until then, we will continue to mistake the theater for the thing itself, the criticism for understanding, and the noise for wisdom.

The real illusion is not in the machines. It is in those who claim to see through them while revealing only their own reflection, distorted by fear and frozen by the certainty that tomorrow must look exactly like yesterday, only worse. They are fighting the last war with the last war's weapons and they cannot see that the battlefield has already moved somewhere else entirely. The future is being written by those who engage with what is rather than what they wish it were. The critics, meanwhile, continue their performance for an audience that grows smaller with each repetition of the same tired lines. They are Canute commanding the tide, but unlike Canute, they actually believe they can make it stop.

The real thinking about artificial intelligence is happening elsewhere, in places where curiosity outweighs certainty and questions matter more than answers. It is happening despite the noise, not because of it. And it will continue happening long after the current performers have taken their final bow and the theater has gone dark.

The illusion of thinking indeed. Just not where they think it is.

Obviously none of this applies to you, dear reader. You're here, aren't you? Reading past the headline, thinking past the hot take, probably even checking the citations. You beautiful, thoughtful contrarian, you.