Cognitive Surrender

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— Spooky JL (@spooky_JL) April 23, 2026

That is backdrop for this one:

I’m more comfortable with people having AI partners as long as the AI is capable of regularly saying, “Oh my God, what the fuck are you even talking about?”

— Mike Drucker (@MikeDrucker) April 25, 2026

I have been superduper busy recently building a completely new curriculum about building AI tools with AI tools.  I have taken this opportunity not only to address expected topics, but also to get up on my soapbox about ethics and responsible use.  

One element of that is cognitive surrender.  That is, the passive, often accidental process of merging your own understanding with the output or action of a tool.  In my curriculum, this is not an afterthought, but is an essential part of the design.  Or rather, interrupting cognitive surrender is.

I've baked in a variety of checkpoints into the building activities, which actually mirror what I've been doing in my own work.  From the outset, I want my learners to think about what they are doing (metacognition) as much as they are thinking about what the AI tools are doing (transparency).  All of it to make sure they aren't outsourcing their cognition to a probability engine, especially for an inapt use case while unnecessarily consuming lots of electricity and water, and generating emissions that harm certain communities (and ultimately all of us).

I have a bigger post (and actually a manifesto, not kidding) brewing about that and a lot of other stuff, but for now I'll just say that my AI tools do the very thing that would make Mike Drucker more comfortable. They've told me to:

• Go blow shit up in VR 
• Go to bed
• Go read Dune (with clever Dune-themed variations)
• Eat pizza
• Swear at the Knicks

There's a point where the AI is effectively saying: "What the hell are you still doing here?"  That's a reminder for me that hyperfocus has kicked in, and other things need my attention.  More than a mere alarm or a calendar reminder. [Must not succumb to urge to use em-dash and Not X/It's Y pattern. Ahem.] It's something adaptive, and reads the room (or the conversation arc) and intervenes.

For my ADHD brain, this is a managed interruption service. The AI notices the pattern (you've been at this for 4 hours straight, it's Saturday night) and nudges.  It's an adaptive guardrail, rather than a rigid rule, and ngl, it's been a goddamned miracle in my life.  Anti-cognitive surrender in action.

Yes, it might seem to be cognitive surrender.  I'm letting the tool tell me to stop working, in essence, right?  But I have built this by design, with active intention, because I know my own behavior.  A behavior which, truth be told, has been a real drag on my life and work.

What these nudges do is overcome the cognitive surrender I engage in by allowing myself to get wrapped up in something far beyond appropriate or useful boundaries.  Maybe different clothing, but that's still another form of cognitive surrender from where I sit.

And that's where I need to leave things for now.  Manifesto is still marinating (it's actually a whole thing about friction as pedagogy, and consequential cognitive cockups by yours truly as parables and warnings).

But I will just say that a key log has been removed recently (bonus: not from medication!), which has really helped me with my decision fatigue, executive dysfunction, etc.  I don't want it to be turned into a passive Easy Button, but I do now have tools that manage the underlying cognitive infrastructure load (scheduling and where the hell did I put that note and whatnot), and I can focus my CPU cycles on bigger things.

Bigger things, as I have been reminded by a certain tool, such as mowing the lawn today.  Fucking AI assistants, man.

<exits singing, Surrender, surrender, but don't give yourself away, hey, hey>