A phenomenological sketch, companion piece to "The Quiet Erasure"
The “symptoms” dramatized here are not simply invented for literary effect. In some sense this is an extension of the depiction in The Quiet Erasure, from personal/cognitive out to the interpersonal— the new, brief strange hesitation before responding to a child, the reflexive appeal to a chatbot during a disagreement with a spouse, a friend's fleeting reaction of “betrayal” when iPhone is consulted instead of her, the kids learning to outsource advice with their device, on their own conflicts.
It is grounded in a growing body of empirical research on AI-mediated communication, "cognitive surrender," and erosion of trust when third-party (AI) is introduced into dialogue. (See the attached reference list.) AI arbitration in disputes can generate feelings of betrayal and diminished trust between partners; heavy AI reliance correlates with reduced tolerance for open-ended, unresolved conversation. Repeated outsourcing to AI may short-circuit the fundamental processes — friction, disagreement, shared reasoning — through which relationships and informed judgment evolve.
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| Clker.com |
This fictional embodiment of the implications of current research was generated initially by Perplexity.ai, responding to the prompt in the Appendix.
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She notices it first in the odd, unsettling pause before she responds to her daughter.
Emma, twelve, is talking about a friend who said something cruel at lunch, and there is a beat — just a beat — where instead of immediately reaching inward for the intuitive wisdom passed down to her through her genes, mothers, mentors and experience that she used to trust her hand moves toward her phone. Not to look anything up, exactly. Just to . . . ask. See what it says. She catches herself sometimes but now not often enough . . .
There used to be a simple “feel” to parenting three children spanning a decade of development — the five-year-old's tantrums, the ten-year-old's homework meltdowns, the fifteen-year-old's silences — the aches, anxieties and fears that were, she now understands, just the “stuff” of becoming and being a mother. She could sit, almost happily with not-knowing. She would fumble lovingly toward an answer with her husband late at night, the two of them turning a problem over and over like a stone, disagreeing, circling back, arriving somewhere. That friction was not a failure of parenting. It was parenting.
Now the chatbot often nails a solution before the disagreement can even properly begin. Her husband raises a concern about, say their son's screen time; she has already asked Grok before he finishes his thought--and reads the confident, bulleted response aloud . . . and watches something flicker across his face that she recognizes, accompanied by a dull twitch in her stomach, something like betrayal — the sense that she trusted a machine over the twelve years of shared understanding and judgment sitting across the table from her. He doesn't argue, he just goes quiet, or he says "sure, ask Grok" in a tone that isn't really agreement. She knows and she has stopped being able to stop it from happening
It has crept into her friendships too, the ones she used to think were immune, sacred even — the two women who have been for fifteen years, her closest confidantes. A coffee that once meandered for two unhurried hours through random, half-formed worries now clips along at a strange new tempo: someone raises a dilemma about an aging parent or a stalled marriage, and within a minute a phone is out, an answer read aloud in the same bright, decisive register the machine always uses. The three of them used to be really good at not knowing together — that was, she realizes now, most of what the friendship was for. Lately she catches her own thumb moving toward the search bar mid-sentence, cutting off a friend who was still finding her way toward what she actually meant to say. She sees the same flicker she saw in her husband's face, quieter, more practiced, almost in hiding. Women who have known each other that long know when they are being uncoupled . . .
The children get it differently. The five-year-old just wants her eyes; increasingly her eyes are elsewhere, mid-scroll, mid-query, present in body only. The ten-year-old has started saying "never mind" when she starts to answer a question with "let's ask—" before she even finishes what she'll ask. The fifteen-year-old has begun mirroring her: bringing conflicts not to her, but with an overheard comments on the phone to her friend like, ”Wait, wait, wait . . my bot will know . . .” She senses the unspoken horror of watching your own worst habit reproduce itself in your baby . . . that she taught this. Not through instruction, but through simple, repeated demonstration: an open question is an intolerable thing to leave sitting in a room, on the table.
Even the dog knows. The old beagle, who has spent nine years reading the emotional weather of this house far better than any of them, has taken to sitting at her feet — phone lit, family voices trailing off unanswered in the next room — looking up at her with blank expression, ears low, eyes fixed on her face, asking a question no chatbot could ever answer. She wonders in passing what it says about her that a beagle's face is what finally makes her put down the damn phone.
She knows. It feels like a limb gone slightly numb — present, but slow to move. A strange, cold clarity is emerging of watching herself outsource not her competence as a mom but her most prized possession — her relationships themselves, one deferred, often trivial answer or judgment at a time. Are the people she loves most now quietly resigning to the fact that she is less and less fully in the house with them at all? And what to do about it is a question that she and Grok and the beagle cannot answer.
AI tools in society: Impacts on cognitive offloading and the future of critical thinking. (2025). AIGL Blog. https://www.aigl.blog/ai-tools-in-society-impacts-on-cognitive-offloading-and-the-future-of-critical-thinking/
Cognitive offloading, critical thinking and attitudes towards artificial intelligence. (2025). PubMed. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42377671/
Talking and thinking with AI: How AI chatbots restructure epistemic identity and virtue. (2025). Poligrafi. https://ojs.zrs-kp.si/index.php/poligrafi/article/view/510
Talking and thinking with AI: How AI chatbots restructure epistemic identity and virtue [PDF]. (2025). Poligrafi. https://ojs.zrs-kp.si/index.php/poligrafi/article/download/510/531/5537
AI and the wisdom of uncertainty. (2026, July). Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/202607/ai-and-the-wisdom-of-uncertainty
Epistemic considerations when AI answers questions [PDF]. (2023). arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.14352.pdf
The AI-mediated communication dilemma: Epistemic trust, social... [PDF]. (2025). PhilPapers. https://philpapers.org/archive/SAHTAC.pdf
Small talk: Is it being replaced by search-first social behaviour? (2026, January). Digital Journal. https://www.digitaljournal.com/social-media/small-talk-is-it-being-replaced-by-search-first-social-behaviour/article
Over-reliance on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, study finds. (2026, June 19). The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/19/chatbots-critical-thinking-skills
Argumentative conversational agents for online discussions. (n.d.). PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8143987/
Smartphones in relational conflicts: Examining when and how they interfere. (2024). Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (or relevant journal). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1041794X.2024.2433507
Dealing with ambiguity in tech projects: A review of tolerance for... (n.d.). Journal of Applied Research in Management and Business. https://www.armanprocessjournal.ir/article_735646_en.html
Tolerance of uncertainty: Conceptual analysis, integrative... (n.d.). PubMed. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28324792/
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