As artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly mediates everyday cognitive tasks, concerns regarding its impact on human flourishing have intensified. This contribution examines the ethical implications of AI-induced changes to the human cognitive system, specifically focusing on metacognition, the capacity to monitor and evaluate one's own thinking processes. Drawing on emerging empirical data, the paper considers the ethical implications of AI-induced outsourcing of mentally demanding tasks through the lens of contemporary philosophical frameworks. Findings suggest that regular AI use fosters types of metacognitive bias, including the overestimation of individual internal knowledge and the conflation of AI outputs with personal understanding. Furthermore, evidence of metacognitive laziness indicates a reduction in deep information processing and mental effort pointing to AI functioning as a disruptive extended mind that replaces rather than extends biological capacities, potentially atrophying intellectual virtue and epistemic agency. Ultimately, the paper concludes that protecting individual mental abilities is an ethical imperative during the current phase of AI adoption. It calls for a balanced regulatory approach and the acknowledgment of mental privileges to ensure technological advancement does not result in systemic cognitive deskilling and the associated loss of fundamental human liberties and well-being.
