Cognitive offloading is the act of handing a mental task to an external system so you no longer perform it yourself. Notes offload remembering; calculators offload arithmetic; AI offloads something newer and broader: drafting, recalling, structuring, and increasingly deciding.
Offloading is not a failure mode in itself. Every designed AI×HI relationship offloads deliberately; that is what the machine is for. The risk this series flags is unexamined offloading: when thinking is outsourced wholesale, engagement becomes shallow and critical faculties get less practice precisely where they are still needed. The drift is comfortable, which is what makes it hard to notice from inside.
The series touches this from two directions. The memory essay finds that even offloading memory, the most natural-seeming delegation, backfires when done by accumulation rather than curation. The queryable-vs-quotable essay relocates the human job to the transfer itself: deciding what to hand over and in what form, which is offloading done as a design act rather than a reflex. The difference between the two is, again, whether anyone is steering.