When I think about one of the most critical thinking tools in the history of civilization, I think about the notebook. Yes, I mean the paper-filled wonder that so many of the world’s greatest thinkers have used to capture thoughts that sometimes contained great ideas.
The calculations and ideas behind Einstein’s reimagination of gravity were housed in the famous Zurich Notebook. Ben Franklin used one when he invented bifocals. Charles Darwin also used notebooks.
Many of the products, institutions, and disciplines we rely on passed through a notebook at some point. While the function of the notebook to express thoughts hasn’t changed, its form factor and how those notes are created has.
AI has entered the notebook
The arrival of the internet and mobile technologies, particularly smartphones and tablet computers, changed the way people take notes. Where once we may have collected thoughts in paper notebooks, we increasingly key notes into mobile applications.
But today we are in the midst of an AI revolution. While previous forms of technology changed the tools we used to take notes from paper and pencil to keyboard or mobile phone, AI offers a different promise: It can actually fill up our notebooks with thoughts for us. This is dangerous.
AI is so good at creating content that people don’t have to think about it. Humans enter a prompt, take the feedback, and fashion something approximating content or collateral. Content creation has become a culture of prompting, copying, and pasting.
But AI may also be slightly wrong in a way that’s hard to detect. I learned this firsthand when I was researching a piece of real estate my parents once owned, and the AI confidently told me my twin brother had changed his last name 40 years ago. He had not.
And while such hallucinations must be caught and cleaned up, they are not the worst aspect of rampant AI use. That is the tendency to overrely on AI, which results in passivity.
When we stop forming thoughts, we also stop building the critical thinking muscle that lets us evaluate what we’re being told. Cognitive offloading, cognitive debt and cognitive atrophy are real concerns.
At the same time, completely ignoring AI isn’t the answer. AI is here to stay, and closing the AI skills gap through training is a key focus for institutions of higher learning seeking to prepare students for knowledge work that is being required with AI technologies. In fact, 87% of educators and education leaders and 79% of students agree that knowing how to use AI effectively and responsibly is important for students’ futures, according to Microsoft.
This is why I think digital note-taking has become more, not less useful in the age of AI. It offers you somewhere to do your thinking around it, rather than instead of it.
How to use AI to help your note-taking
For some of my note-taking tasks, I’ll use an AI tool for research, collect the useful information in a note, and then create automated summaries using AI. Then I might chat with my notes, using AI to research key points and flesh out that material further.
That sequence matters. The AI is doing work in service of my thinking, not replacing it. I’m deciding what’s worth collecting, evaluating the summary, and turning research into a plan. I am not passively consuming what the AI produces, but engaging with and critiquing the content before arriving at my own conclusions. I am an active participant in the process, not a bystander.
Now consider how note-taking might happen in various knowledge work roles in organizations worldwide.
Sales people take digital notes in the field, then transfer them back to their corporate office to build blueprints for customer success. HR workers can begin to build the kind of employee profiles that bolster institutional knowledge.
For all of these functions and business processes, AI is enhancing note-taking.
Notes are not going away
Keep taking notes. Not because you’ll always need to refer back to them, but because the act of taking notes, which includes deciding what to capture and how to phrase it, adds structure and clarity to your productivity work. Most importantly, it requires thinking.
That’s not something you should hand off to AI. The notebook has survived every era of communication technology. This one is no different. But it is important to be intentional about how you incorporate AI into your note-taking, which is a proxy for your thought process.
Because without coherent thought, all you have is more AI-generated noise while increasing cognitive debt.