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The Soul of AI: Pre-Digital Cognition
Post Date
January 11, 2026
Earlier this week I was presented with the opportunity to play around with an INSTAX camera and honestly, it was a really heavy responsibility. You only get one chance to get the take right! If you mess up the take, that moment is lost forever. At least you can see if the photo comes out wrong fairly quickly. What about 20 years ago when you had to wait weeks in order to go and get them printed? Even worse.
The gap between wanting something and having to wait for it trained patience. Not by choice, but by necessity. In my previous article, I wrote about AI as a mirror, reflecting back to us the exact intentions and awareness of the humans who created it. The creators’ intentions and awareness weren’t programmed by the AI itself. However, ours are increasingly becoming so.
What then happens when our intentions, awareness and general cognition are shaped by digital thinking, by the systems we once created?
Pre digital cognition was built on friction and patience. There was a clear gap between wanting and getting. This gap shaped how you thought and created. Ideas required care and attention as changing your mind in the middle of the process was expensive. Knowledge acquired was hard won, which was due to the time investment necessary.
With the advent of AI, the gap has collapsed completely. Text, image and music can be generated & born near instantly. There’s no need for development or maturation of ideas, they can be developed on the fly, building whilst already in the air. There’s no need to ask “Is this good or bad?“. The question to ask is: What was lost in that “gap” that an immediate birth doesn’t provide?
The journey disappears. The idea from conception to gestation to birth is long-winding and time consuming. A relationship was developed with the idea, with the concept. What happens when the process to think has shrunk? Does the process of thinking change? Does this affect the output?
Going back to the INSTAX camera, one thing that was different to using my phone was that you had limited shots. 10 in a film. You had to be discerning and particular about what you wanted to capture. Limits force behaviour change. You loan a book from a library or game / movie from a video rental place, you need to return it in two weeks. When a CD was burned, there was only so much space.
Scarcity creates prioritisation. Taking photos on the INSTAX, I had to watch, wait and choose when to take a photo. You develop the ability to recognise what matters. Memory is the same. When was the last time you had to memorise a phone number? Or recall directions? You don’t need to prioritise what to remember, as you don’t really need to remember anything.
AI and digital systems offer seemingly infinite forms of a given idea. Look up a popular hashtag on TikTok. You can find anything, generate images until one hits. Ask endless questions and always receive an answer. Do you even need to remember an idea if you can get an answer again? When the skills of thinking, choosing and committing aren’t required, do they disappear? Or deteriorate to the point of being unusable?
The ability to sit in boredom, being able to tolerate not knowing. Being able to trust your own thought without asking an AI or forum for their opinion. This is the new normal. Why struggle when an answer is always available? It’s easy to find information; it’s hard to know information, to develop an understanding from wrestling with ideas. So what’s the main difference between pre-digital cognition and post-digital cognition? Pre-digital cognition was slow but it was unmistakably yours. Post-digital cognition is quick but could belong to anybody.
I described AI as a mirror. However, a mirror is only useful if you remember what you looked like before stepping in front of it.
Pre-digital cognition still exists, but it exists through deliberate choice. Through conscious rejection of an instant world. This is where the soul of AI resides, by refusing to surrender your human processes to external powers.
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