Cognitive meandering takes us to places that an AI response or algorithmic feed cannot. Many decisions in my life and ideas in my work have emerged not from seeking them directly, but as unexpected by-products of following a line of inquiry. It might start with an unexpected encounter that reverberates beyond the present moment and stays with me. It may be a comment, podcast episode or passage of prose that keeps returning to my mind, inviting further consideration, mental stretch, or a bubble of inspiration. It might be a resource or idea discovered while looking for something else. The value of these moments lies partly in their unpredictability and their resistance to engineering and control. They are unbidden intersections of curiosity and chance. While there is often a question, tension or curiosity that sets us in motion, the most interesting discoveries frequently emerge along the way rather than at the intended destination.

This blog is an enactment of the concept of flânerie, which I see as a philosophy of attention and a deliberate practice of observing, noticing, engaging, and following the randomness of human experience. It embraces serendipity over efficiency. Here on the blog, I write to offer unfinished expressions of thought and explorations of sense-making. I write my way into understanding, often unsure of where the text will take me, or where I am taking the reader.

We are, however, currently living in a world more in favour of the quick and polished output, now so achievable via technology.

Our technologies do more than help us communicate. They become fused into how we think. They transform how we access knowledge, connect with others, and construct our identities. The codex, slate, printing press, pen, typewriter, word processor, internet search engine, and smartphone, each altered the relationship between thought and expression. Each was met with a mixture of enthusiasm, anxiety and resistance. Plato worried that writing would erode memory and lead to people relying on written accounts rather than memory. The emergence of the printing press led to concerns that the technology would lead to laziness, loss of essential skills, the spread of questionable information, and societal (even moral) decay. Commentary on early smartphone and laptop use shared worries about diminished learning, reduced cognitive abilities, and social disconnection.

Generative artificial intelligence is the latest chapter in this long story of the co-evolution of humans and machines. AI has become our ubiquitous companion, even when we are not choosing for it to be. It can synthesise, summarise, organise, recommend and generate, moving quickly through vast amounts of information, identifying patterns and acting as a thinking partner or assistant. Yet AI often privileges the clean destination over the messy journey. It rewards uniform outputs over the friction of relational encounters or cognitive struggle. We can leap directly from a prompt to a finished piece, short-circuiting the productive discomfort of staring at a blank page, wrestling to find the words, or grappling with the idea. Labour and effort disappear, along with surprise and uncertainty.

Recent research has raised questions about whether heavy reliance on AI-assisted writing may contribute to what Kosmyna and colleagues describe as ‘cognitive debt’.

“When individuals fail to critically engage with a subject, their writing might become biased and superficial. This pattern reflects the accumulation of cognitive debt, a condition in which repeated reliance on external systems like LLMs replaces the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking.” (Kosmyna et al., 2025)

This systematic outsourcing risks flattening the idiosyncrasies that make our writing our own. Writing can become homogenised into predictable, standardised ways of expressing ourselves. Even reading swathes of AI-generated text affects how we then go on to write, as we internalise the patterns we consume.

Nearly a decade ago, well before LLMs reshaped our daily work, I wrote about ‘cyborg scholarship’ (Netolicky, 2017). My exploration drew on Donna Haraway and the cyborgs in the television series Westworld, trapped in their repetitive loops. Those loops were authored by someone else, until the characters broke free to find and generate their own variations from the plan. I argued then that the academic writer was already an integration of organism and machine, entangled with technologies.

Even further back, M.T. Anderson’s 2002 novel, Feed, envisioned a world where humans completely outsource their cognition to a neural network, trading wondering and wandering for the instant gratification of an individualised, commercialised feed delivered directly into their consciousness. The characters exist in an entirely detour-less existence with every desire anticipated and every answer provided.

If we are to be both cyborg and flâneuse we cannot treat AI as a shortcut to bypass thought. Instead, we can resist the quick conclusion and the erasure of the cognitive adventure. We can work to partner with technologies as tools for deeper interrogation, to ask good questions, to expose and challenge biases, to interrogate thinking, and to spend time in uncertainty.

In a world increasingly oriented towards optimisation and AI-assisted efficiency, we should intentionally preserve the forms of wandering, uncertainty, struggle and serendipity that contribute to human thinking. Let us stay open to the generative detour, the accidental discovery, and the beautiful, essential messiness of a mind wandering its way into being and becoming. At times, let us consciously choose the longer route.

References

Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X. H., Beresnitzky, A. V., … & Maes, P. (2025). Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.08872, 4. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

Netolicky, D. M. (2017). Cyborgs, desiring-machines, bodies without organs, and Westworld: Interrogating academic writing and scholarly identity. KOME: An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry, 5(1), 91-103. https://komejournal.com/files/KOME_DN.pdf