Why Conscious Resistance to Seamless AI May Save Your Career

This post is part of our series on expertise and AI. If you're concerned about preserving and enhancing the value of your expertise as AI advances, consider joining our short course in August to learn the psychological strategies needed to make your expertise even more valuable with AI.

You've spent twenty years on what philosopher Bernard Stiegler called the "long circuit" of development, which is about real transformation—the kind that comes from sticking with complex, meaningful challenges over time.

This post is part of our series on expertise and AI. If you're concerned about preserving and enhancing the value of your expertise as AI advances, consider joining our short course in August to learn the psychological strategies needed to make your expertise even more valuable with AI.

You’ve spent the last two decades on what philosopher Bernard Stiegler called the “long circuit” — the slower path of development shaped by deep engagement with complex, often inefficient challenges.

Stiegler described this as fundamentally different from short-circuit forms of learning. One builds depth. The other optimizes speed. Long circuits involve extended processes that transform who you are at a deep level. We probably all knew a violin student who endured years of scales that sounded terrible, who gradually trained their ear to distinguish microtonal differences. This process literally rewired their auditory perception and motor control. They eventually became a person whose relationship with sound was fundamentally altered.

Short circuits deliver immediate results while bypassing the transformative journey entirely. You can take a helicopter to the summit, but only the climber becomes someone different through the journey—someone with enhanced physical capabilities, mental resilience, and a transformed relationship with challenge itself.

Your professional expertise follows this same pattern. Those twenty years of difficult cases shaped your capacity to advocate for unpopular positions when data is ambiguous, to feel the weight of committing to decisions with real consequences, to navigate uncertainty while taking responsibility for outcomes. The struggle itself built your professional identity.

AI as the Ultimate Short Circuit

Stiegler understood that those years of "inefficient" struggle weren't waste—they were your brain's way of constructing internal frameworks for judgment, developing pattern recognition through failure, building neural pathways for navigating complexity. Each discarded draft, each wrong turn, each difficult decision was actually building the person who could eventually work with authentic expertise and hard-won wisdom.

Now AI offers to bypass this developmental process entirely. Complex analysis appears in seconds. Sophisticated outputs emerge without the messy work of building judgment through trial and error. Why struggle when you can achieve the same results instantly?

AI represents short-circuit technology at its most extreme. It promises to eliminate the developmental friction that creates professional judgment. But what happens to professional identity when the journey that made you who you are can now be bypassed?

We observe professionals developing what we call Identity Coupling with AI—their sense of professional self becomes entangled with AI interaction. Not through conscious choice, but through felt experience. The tools make them feel more capable, creative, efficient. Their professional identity begins to include this AI relationship as a core component.

The crisis emerges when they realize they've become dependent on something that didn't exist three years ago. Colleagues notice they seem unable to make decisions without consulting AI. The long circuit that built their expertise has been unconsciously abandoned for the efficiency of the short circuit.

Stiegler's insight suggests that the solution is to be conscious of which circuit you're choosing. Professionals who thrive are those who understand that their irreplaceable value lies in the quality of thinking, judgment, and wisdom that only develops through sustained engagement with meaningful challenges.

This means creating conscious frameworks for preserving long circuit processes while leveraging AI capabilities. Conscious symbiosis requires intentional friction—moments where you pause, choose what to preserve versus what to delegate, and maintain the struggle that builds genuine expertise.

What We're Learning

Our research on how people adapt to AI reveals several key patterns:

• Identity Coupling without conscious frameworks leads to crisis - professionals who drift into AI dependence without awareness experience more fracture when reality hits

• Symbolic Plasticity protects against problematic dependency - people who can consciously reframe their relationship to AI navigate the transition more successfully

• Fracture often comes from external recognition - colleagues and clients noticing AI dependency triggers professional identity crisis

• Conscious reconstruction enables growth - professionals who use fracture moments to deliberately rebuild their AI relationships maintain agency and expertise

• Tech design works against consciousness - seamless, frictionless AI integration accelerates unconscious dependency

The choice is between conscious preservation of the long circuits that built your expertise and unconscious drift toward short circuits that may erode the very identity that twenty years of struggle created.