The E-Bike Problem

Last Friday, late at night, I was on my way home and I had a choice: grab the electric Vélib (a bike-share system we have in Paris), or the regular one. Same bike-share system, same destination. But the electric version would get me there faster, with less effort. So I took it.

No judgment there, I was (very) tired and it was a practical decision. But somewhere during my crossing of Paris at 20km/h, I started thinking about what I’d opted out of.

The path of least resistance

We’re living in a golden age of friction removal. E-bikes instead of regular, manual bikes. AI instead of writing. Auto-generated LinkedIn comments instead of actually thinking about what someone said.

Each individual choice is defensible. You’re busy or have a lot to thing about. The tool is right there, at your disposal. I get it!

But the pattern that emerges is that we are more and more choosing the assisted version of things. The problem is that we’re losing something in the trade.

I’d call it the capacity to sit in discomfort.

What effort actually does to your brain

There’s a reason athletes train every day and don’t take the escalator. Physical fitness is built through resistance. The muscle doesn’t grow in the rest.

Cognitive fitness works exactly the same way.

When you write something from scratch you’re clarifying your mind. You’re discovering where your thinking is fuzzy, and this is building the capacity to think harder next time.

But there’s something even more fundamental at stake than sharpness or productivity.

I recently spoke with Grégoire Borst, Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at Université Paris Cité, on the Education Futures podcast. One thing he said has stayed with me: Learning, he explained, is not something that happens in dedicated moments (school, courses, workshops), it is an everyday process. Every time we do something, repeat something, struggle through something, our brain is changing. And crucially: there is no age limit to this. The brain remains plastic throughout life. Every moment of genuine effort leaves a trace.

And the inverse is also true. The less we challenge our brains, the less we build what researchers call cognitive reserve i.e, the accumulated neural resilience that protects us over time. Borst is direct about what that means: the more consistently we engage in demanding cognitive activity across our lives, the more we protect ourselves against neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It’s pure biology.

When we outsource our thinking to AI, our writing or reasoning, we are skipping the exercise. We are letting the muscle atrophy. And like any muscle you too rarely use, the long-term consequences can be detrimental to us.

This is a values problem

I’m not arguing that AI is bad, or that e-bikes shouldn’t exist. I use both (well, if I'm honest, I'll almost always pick the regular Vélib bike. I love cycling, and even crossing Paris, I'd rather use my legs and do something useful for them!)

But I think we’ve been so blinded by capability/pace/performance that we’ve forgotten to ask: what do I want to be capable doing?

Because I want to stay physically fit, I don’t commute by e-bike every day. I make deliberate choices to work out and make my body go through hard things. The same logic applies to my mind. If I want to be a sharp thinker (and protect and muscle up my brain throughout my life), I have to preserve some space for the struggle.

And collectively as a society we need to value slowness, imperfection, uncertainty. We need to value those qualities as essential parts of our humanity.

The danger for our kids and students

This matters especially in education, where the stakes are high and the temptation to take shortcuts (i.e. the easy way out with AI) is even higher.

For adults we might talk about cognitive offloading when we delegate to AI tasks we already know how to do which leads to letting the muscle atrophy.

For children and teenagers, Rebecca Winthrop, Director, Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution talks about cognitive stunting1: they never develop the skills in the first place.

"Cognitive development, like learning to ride a bike, cannot be outsourced. Children cannot learn to ride by having someone else pedal for them. In the same way, they cannot learn to think if AI routinely suggests ideas, writes text, designs solutions, or solves problems on their behalf."
Rebecca Winthrop, Director, Center for Universal Education, Brookings Institution

When a student uses AI to write their essay, you could argue that it questions their academic integrity. But more importantly: writing is thinking. Every time they skip the writing, they skip learning how to think and what I’m particularly worried about is that in the end they lose the tolerance for discomfort and discomfort is an essential part of the learning process.

This is why we should teach students how to learn and the value of friction. The kind that comes from doing something hard because the doing is where the value lies.

For us adults this could be taking the regular Vélib bike sometimes or writing the first draft ourselves. We should aim to remain capable of doing things on our own and try to protect the brain that will carry us through the rest of our life.

For kids, choosing effort is an act of cognitive development, without it, their brains won’t develop well enough, and the impact of this could well be disastrous.

For adults, and for you dear reader, choosing effort is an act of self-preservation and if I may, of self-love. Love of the imperfect parts of us. Love of the humanity within us.

Happy struggling!

Svenia Busson is the co-founder of Education Futures, a Paris-based think tank on AI and education.