The Quiet Death Of Critical Thinking In The Age Of AI Summaries

AI summaries may improve speed but reduce depth, retention and independent critical thinking.

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For years, technology has been designed to remove friction from our lives. But some forms of friction, especially in how we read and think, may be more valuable than we realized.

For the first 25 years of traveling for my job, my trusty companions on plane flights were books. At the time, there were no tablets or ebooks, and most laptops were optimized for work rather than recreational or educational reading.

I used to love spending time in bookstores looking for the next book or two I could read on the plane. I would often travel with a book bag that held at least three hardcover books, especially on long trips to Europe and Asia.

Why Deep Reading Still Matters

Over the past four decades, I’ve watched the evolution of how we work, communicate and think change, mostly for the better. But one shift concerns me more than the rest: the quiet erosion of deep reading, and with it, an appreciation for why it still matters.

Reading is never just the consumption of information. It is how we learn to think. When you engage with a substantial work, you are forced to slow down—to debate an argument, wrestle with an idea that unsettles you, and return to passages that don’t quite land the first time. That friction isn’t accidental. It is the mechanism by which knowledge is gained.

But that kind of engagement is becoming less common. We are entering an era of what I think of as “digital CliffsNotes,” where speed and convenience take precedence over depth.

The Hidden Cost of Convenience

Listening and skimming are not the same as reading in this way. When a summary is handed to you, you move faster, but you also surrender the mental effort that makes ideas stick. This is not just intuition. Decades of research show that students who take notes by hand retain more than those who take notes on a computer. The same dynamic applies to how we read.

Recent reporting suggests AI summaries may improve speed but reduce depth, retention and independent critical thinking.

I see this shift in my own habits, and it concerns me. Before AI and automated summaries, I approached long-form articles the way I had been trained; slowly and deliberately. Now, I find myself scanning for the paragraph that “matters,” or worse, waiting for an AI-generated summary to do the hard work before I even open the piece. I’m not abandoning ideas; I’m abandoning the effort required to engage with them, often without realizing it.

I don't think I'm alone. In the last two years, I had a chance to talk with leaders in the tech industry. Many of them spent much of their careers reading thick reports, and they all admitted to the same thing: when they open an article, they check out a summary that is often offered at the top. They never get to read any further. This is not laziness. This is the natural result of tools designed to eliminate friction.

Why Friction Matters

Here is the irony of this AI era. The tech industry has spent the last thirty years optimizing for speed and convenience. In practically every case, this has worked to the benefit of users. But not every cognitive process can be optimized. Some of them actually depend on the friction that speed removes. Deep reading is one such process. Deep, critical thinking is another.

This is not to say that AI summarizers are necessarily bad. I use them every day. They save me a lot of time on stuff that doesn’t require deep reading. A technical spec sheet or an earnings announcement can probably afford a summary. But there is a difference between using the technology to filter out noise and using it to opt out of thinking. The problem is not the technology. It is how easily we forget what it does to us.

Every technological wave reshapes not just what we do, but how we think. The PC changed how we work. The smartphone changed how we pay attention. Generative AI may be changing something deeper—the amount of thinking we choose to do at all.

I don’t have a simple fix to this growing problem. But I’ve started making small, deliberate changes: setting aside time for focused reading, resisting the summary at the top of the article, and letting myself stay with an argument long enough to question it. In an industry built on removing friction, choosing to reintroduce it may be one of the most important decisions we make.