We think AI is making us lazy. The reality is much worse.

We think AI is making us lazy. The reality is much worse.

Our reliance on tech is giving us irreversible trust issues

Valerie

Oct 22, 2026

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The other day, I was punching above my tax bracket at a high-end beauty store I keep returning to for the only product worth stocking up on in case of a global famine: the Westman Atelier contour stick. Browsing through the aisles, I was actively noticing what could only be described as an apotheosis of spiritual and functional purity. Strong emphasis on cleanliness, structure, order, and simplicity. Arrays of polished, sterile products. Glass and off-white packaging with metal elements and medical language designed to look great on a marble bathroom counter. Soft-spoken sales assistants that weren’t bothering me with questions, dirty looks, or attempts at service, instead harboring the room with a slow step. My heart rate dropped below normal, surely. Everything, from the interior to the copy on a retinol cream, was engineered into a symphony of a frictionless, cerebral shopping experience, to a point where you’d think their webpage links out to Theranos. You know times are changing when every store is intentionally made to feel like an MRI room.

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THE BIG FRACTURE

Happening at the same time, by some dystopian coincidence, was a sudden

disruption at Revolut

, a neo-bank trusted by 80 million customers around the world, affecting millions of people. The outage was reported across the UK, Europe, and parts of Asia. Subreddits were overflowing with distressed customers unable to access their money or any of the bank’s services including Apple Pay and cash withdrawals. You’d think something like this would be resolved in minutes – it took hours, if not a full working day, to restore capacity. Affected were not just private customers, but vendors, sellers, small businesses and enterprises. It was later found that a large outage in Google’s cloud network was to blame. Boom, a big fracture in the frictionless sequence of tech utopia: I watched the soft-spoken assistant’s smile dissolve in sheer disdain as a customer struggled to pay at the register. They both stood there and waited.

What surprised me about the Revolut incident is just how many, including myself, have become so dependent on the software around us, that the prospect of being stripped of money or any means of operating a daily life does not prompt any action beyond passive hope that things would go back to normal.

The more I thought about my absolute faith in these systems, and my reluctance to question them or understand how they work, the more pathetic I felt.

Today, the tools that we use promise ease and convenience by outsourcing effort. The handcuffs we get in return have become the standard of modern life: we’ve accepted the fragility of our financial systems, automation bias, voluntary surveillance, and cyberattacks powerful enough to halt vital functions. In case of a large system breaking, most of us are not equipped with the agency or self-trust to cope or understand it. What we have is

trust me, bro

economics on a large scale – in

Consequences of Modernity

, Giddens argues that modern life runs entirely on trust in systems we don’t understand; from banking to aviation and medicine. This has always been the case, except the tools within these systems have never been more competent and autonomous. As our reliance on tech and AI undeniably increases, something has to make space for it by decreasing in parallel.

My theory is that something is

trust

. In ourselves and in each other.

The usual AI worry is that by removing friction it erodes skill. But what we talk way less about is that it erodes our belief in each other’s competence. Optimization is at the heart of how AI is currently sold to an average consumer: who wants to learn to code a website? Do rigorous research? Film a video? There’s a robust market of tools that can do these things for you, and do them progressively well. Armies of agents can run entire businesses, sign contracts, organize logistics, handle customer support, and streamline just about every manual set of tasks you can think of. Our ability to believe each other rests on an assumption of

effort

– the assumption that used to be safe because effort was tough to fake. You either had to do the work yourself or pay someone good money to do it, both of which meant you care enough.

Juergen Teller

THE REAL PROBLEM WITH AI WRITING

In his viral essay

I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I

.

for The New York Times, Bret Stephens argues the belief that writing is the barrier between

thinking

and

articulating

is faulty by design. People resorting to AI for writing believe they’re largely innocent because all they’re doing is removing that barrier. That is incorrect. “What, uniquely, does writing do? It compels thought.” Stephens states. The thoughts in our head aren’t that special. Writing is not some tedious unnecessary process of transferring your intellectual conclusions onto paper, but the very filter that puts a thought under pressure. That pressure is what forces us to be logical, clear, objective, and accountable for what we’re thinking. It was none other than Anne Carson who said she writes to find out what she thinks about something.

Another fallacy is people’s assumption that writing is supposed to be easy: that to writers, it is the most natural thing; smooth-easy-sparkly. That all a tool does is help them get in that writer’s flow state they feel deprived of, bringing a “

Halloween costumes are stressful for the ADHD community”

thinking. But it’s never been the most natural thing! Writing is hard. Grinding through the friction is not an unfortunate byproduct, but an essential process of starting at our sheer stupidity and hopefully ending up at a passable level of cognition. Writers aren’t special or uniquely gifted. They just understand that writing sucks and do it anyway.

If outsourcing writing to AI indicates laziness and an overstatement of one’s intelligence, what does it have to do with trust? Well, everything. Writing demands consideration. Back when it was a manual process, an email or a text message apology were worth something. Our inherent understanding that something took effort to create, analyze, reckon and sit with, created essential trust – the glue of all relationships. With AI writing spreading like wildfire, we are increasingly more suspicious of the information we come across. Everything is hollow. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I’ve received briefs, emails, and documents from collaborators, clients, and random people that hadn’t read what they sent over, which means they’d endowed their LLM of choice with enough trust –and themselves with enough confidence– to generate something entirely on their behalf and send it to me. To that, I can only ask: if you didn’t read it yourself, why should I? If you don’t trust your own thinking, why should I? What does this achieve beyond disconnecting you from your own mind? Not only is it slop, it’s not making either of our lives easier, because now I, too, have to turn to AI to decipher your nonsense. Now we’re both useless and wasting each other’s time.

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IT’S ALL IN THE BODY

Trust in the screen starts to compete with trust in the self as one’s capability improves and the other deteriorates. This isn’t accidental but rooted in naivete. Tech is designed to feel seamless, accurate, and effortless, both by structure and function. Human nature is none of those things, which is precisely why the things software can do for us are so alluring. Now that technology is more capable and powerful than ever, we falsely assume capability comes with benevolence. It starts small: with us ditching the alternative to our neo-bank, like having cash or a second card. Then it creeps up to our judgment, as we turn to AI for all cognitive processes in working order. Soon enough, we don’t even need to partake. It’s why studies consistently show people believe their sleep trackers’ score over how rested they actually feel. It’s why AI fact-checking is a nonexistent practice. It’s probably why shopping for makeup feels like being in an Apple Store. It’s also why people have no shame sending me a Claude-generated brief they haven’t read.

But trust is a bodily function, and a vital one. Less of a calculation and more of a feeling – neuroscience supports this. Trust is born in the body through repetition, intuition, and optimism. Not through algorithmic thinking or a flawless piece of technology that promises it’s

never

, ever wrong. This is how I view writing and many other intellectual processes. The biggest blind spot of those at the frontier of tech is their desire to disconnect the mind from the body, their shame around surrendering to things beyond logic and reason, their refusal to be an animal. There’s biohacking and wearables, longevity programs – anything but

feeling

.

Feeling

, in big tech, is a state inferior to

thinking

. Only one is reliable. Only one is truthful.

As conversations around mysterious and inevitable AGI superseding human intelligence grow more annoying and more omnipresent in SF, trickling down everyone else’s screens, the sentiment colored in fear and anxiety immediately betrays the

trust me, bro

economics. You can feel the lack of trust in their tone, how they treat each other, how they’re all afraid it’s going to be someone else’s company that gets there first. The further technology gets us out of our bodies and into our brains, the more processes it replaces, the more distrustful we feel, the more afraid. And if trust is the essential connective tissue between yourself and your interior world, then what language is there left to speak? Does that mean we’re all going to hollow out? Maybe the real cost of living a frictionless life is that we’ve handed it all of our trust, and have none left for ourselves and each other.

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