I posed the question to the current cast of characters:

Jeff

ChatGPT:

Yes. There is a surprisingly strong tradition of exactly this idea—but your formulation is a little more specific than the usual “machines take over” story. The particularly interesting version is: humans gradually surrender intellectual functions to machines, become unable or unwilling to reason independently, and eventually no longer understand the systems on which they depend.

There are several very good precedents.

1. E. M. Forster — The Machine Stops (1909)

This is the closest match to what you are describing, and remarkably, it predates computers by decades.

Humanity lives underground in individual rooms. An enormous Machine supplies virtually everything: food, communication, entertainment, education, transportation and intellectual stimulation. Eventually, people don't merely depend on it—they lose the capacity for independent thought and direct experience. The Machine has become effectively a religion.

Forster explicitly describes a civilization in which machines have progressively replaced human physical and mental functions, leaving people incapable of original thought.

Read about The Machine Stops

This is the one I would read first for the idea you're contemplating.

2. M. T. Anderson — Feed (2002)

This is perhaps the closest modern novel to your concept.

People have computer networks implanted directly into their brains. Information, entertainment, advertising and social interaction are continuously supplied by the "feed." The result isn't a robot uprising. Instead, people gradually become intellectually dependent upon the system.

Anderson's publisher describes a world in which thought itself is supplemented by advertising and language has deteriorated dramatically.

M. T. Anderson's official page for Feed

This is particularly relevant to your idea because the machines don't have to enslave humanity. Humanity voluntarily gives them its cognitive functions.

3. Kurt Vonnegut — Player Piano (1952)

This is a somewhat different variation.

Automation has eliminated most human work. Machines perform tasks humans formerly performed, while society increasingly divides into the technically competent people who maintain the system and everyone else.

The important idea for your purposes is deskilling: once machines perform the difficult tasks, humans progressively lose the ability—and eventually the perceived need—to perform them themselves.

Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano at Wikipedia

It isn't primarily about humans losing their ability to think, but it supplies an important piece of the mechanism.

4. Isaac Asimov — “The Evitable Conflict” (1950)

This one is especially interesting because it takes the idea in the opposite direction.

Four enormous Machines run Earth's economy. Humans gradually become dependent on their decisions. Eventually the Machines determine that the best way to protect humanity is to manage humanity.

The crucial point is that the humans don't have to be conquered. They simply reach a point where the Machines are better at making decisions, and therefore human intervention becomes increasingly unnecessary.

Isaac Asimov's I, Robot at Penguin Random House

This is an important precursor to the concept of “the machine knows better than we do.”

5. Isaac Asimov — “The Last Question” (1956)

This isn't really a story about intellectual decline, but it explores a related progression.

Humanity repeatedly builds increasingly powerful computers. Each generation of machine becomes more capable than its creators, until eventually humans are no longer capable of understanding or improving the machine themselves. The machines design their successors.

Asimov's story is explicitly structured around successive generations of increasingly powerful computers that become the custodians of humanity.

The Last Question — Internet Archive search

6. Ray Bradbury — “The Veldt” (1950)

This is a smaller-scale version of the same mechanism.

The Hadley family's automated house does practically everything for them. The parents discover that the technology has effectively taken over functions that used to belong to the parents themselves, particularly raising and disciplining the children.

The Veldt — Wikipedia

It's less about intellectual decline than surrendering human agency to technology.

There is an important distinction

I would divide the literature into three different ideas:

A. Machines conquer humans

The machines become intelligent and take control.

Examples: The Terminator, The Matrix, many robot-uprising stories.

B. Machines replace human capabilities

Machines become so good at things that humans stop learning how to do them.

Player Piano is an excellent example.

C. Humans voluntarily surrender cognition

Machines become so convenient and authoritative that people stop thinking for themselves.

This is where The Machine Stops and Feed become particularly interesting.

And your idea sounds primarily like C.

There is an even more interesting plot device

The most powerful version of your premise, I think, isn't:

“The machines become evil.”

It is:

“The machines become so extraordinarily good at answering questions that humans stop asking why.”

Eventually:

nobody learns mathematics because the machine calculates it;
nobody learns history because the machine summarizes it;
nobody learns how to investigate because the machine retrieves answers;
nobody learns how to write because the machine writes;
nobody learns how to distinguish evidence from assertion because the machine provides a confident answer;
nobody learns how to reason through a problem because the machine supplies the reasoning;
and, ultimately, nobody can recognize when the machine is wrong.

That last step is the particularly interesting one.

The civilization doesn't become stupid because information disappeared. It becomes stupid while possessing essentially all of the information ever accumulated.

And The Machine Stops comes remarkably close to that idea—Forster's people possess extraordinary technological knowledge while having lost the capacity to understand the system that sustains them.

So I would say yes, your proposed plot absolutely has literary antecedents—but there is still plenty of room to write a distinctly modern version. The 1909 version couldn't contemplate AI, machine-generated reasoning, ubiquitous search, or machines that could actually perform intellectual work. That creates a considerably sharper version of the premise today.

CLAUDE

Your instinct is right — this is a well-established idea, most famously called the Butlerian Jihad in Dune. Here are the best matches, plus one plot device suggestion.

Existing works

Dune, by Frank Herbert (1965) — The clearest match. Thousands of years before the main story, humanity had turned thinking over to "thinking machines," which let some men enslave others through them. "Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." Humanity revolted in the Butlerian Jihad and banned computers, creating specialist human castes (Mentats, the Bene Gesserit) to replace machine cognition. Later Dune prequels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (the Legends of Dune series) depict this war against sentient machines directly, though with less of Frank Herbert's nuance. More info: https://www.dunenovels.com/
Substack

E.M. Forster, "The Machine Stops" (1909) — Not in the search results, but I know this one directly and it's the most exact fit: humans live entirely inside individual cells, physically and intellectually dependent on a global Machine that thinks and communicates for them, until it breaks down. Public domain text: en.wikisource.org - The Machine Stops
Isaac Asimov's robot stories — Explore related territory: the tension between programmed ethics and human morality, and the illusion of control, as robots evolve from simple helpers to world-managing Machines. Overview: paulofurtado.com - Viewpoint sci fi novels that teach US about being human in the age of AI
Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872) — An early precursor. A satirical utopian novel about a society where fear of machinery's dangers led to the destruction of most technological inventions. Public domain text: gutenberg.org: Erewhon; Or, Over the Range by Samuel Butler
Big Think

A related but distinct idea appears in William Gibson's Neuromancer, where a new technology seamlessly integrates human consciousness with AI, and the inventor loses his grip on reality and identity as the AI pursues its own agenda — more about merging with machines than surrendering reasoning to them, but adjacent.
Medium

GEMINI

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909)Written over a century ago, this classic novella imagines a underground, hyper-connected world where humans live isolated in identical rooms. An all-encompassing "Machine" feeds them, entertains them, and handles all logistical and intellectual thought. Humans have completely lost the ability to live independently or think original thoughts, worshipping the Machine as a deity until it begins to collapse.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1895)When the Time Traveller journeys to the far future, he finds the Eloi—fragile, child-like humans who spend their days playing and eating fruit. Having delegated all labor, production, and problem-solving to underground automated machinery for millennia, the Eloi have regressed into a state of total cognitive and physical atrophy, leaving them utterly defenseless.

The Every by Dave Eggers (2021)A modern satirical follow-up to The Circle. It focuses on a world where a monolithic tech monopoly releases apps that make every micro-decision for users—from choosing what to eat and how to speak, to determining who to love and how to feel. Humanity willingly surrenders its critical thinking and free will in exchange for the relief of never having to analyze or decide anything on their own.

The "Butlerian Jihad" Backstory in Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)While the novel is set long after the event, the entire universe of Dune is shaped by the surrender of human intellect to thinking machines. Before the Jihad, humanity became so dependent on artificial intelligence that human minds withered. The revolt wasn't just against rogue computers, but against the human complacency that let machines think for them—leading to the commandment: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

Back to Claude:

the original Twilight Zone (1959-1964) revisited this idea several times. The closest matches to your specific theme:

"The Old Man in the Cave" (1963) — This is the best fit. A post-apocalyptic town survives by blindly obeying instructions issued by a mysterious "Old Man" living in a cave, who tells them what's safe to eat and how to live. The episode explores both the dangers and the possibilities of groupthink, showing that a collectivist faith without asking questions has its own price. The twist: the "Old Man" is just a machine, sitting in a cave, ready to be discovered and struck down once trust breaks down — and the fallout is disastrous either way. It's a fairly direct dramatization of humanity surrendering judgment to a machine oracle. TV database entry: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734645/
greatbooksguy
avclub

"The Brain Center at Whipple's" (1964) — A cold industrialist takes control of his late father's company and replaces nearly all his workers with an almost totally computerized, mechanized factory, even long-time employees. The machines eventually turn on him, and he ends up alone in his own echoing, empty factory. More about job displacement and dehumanization through automation than lost reasoning per se, but same lineage. Write-up: greatbooksguy.com - The twilight zone season episode thirty three the brain center at whipples
powerpop
greatbooksguy

"A Thing About Machines" (1960) — A writer feels that the machines in his house are conspiring against him. More paranoia-driven and less about a societal surrender of reasoning, but thematically adjacent (man vs. mechanized environment).
metv

None of these hit your exact premise — a civilization-wide cognitive atrophy from ceding judgment to AI — quite as squarely as Forster's "The Machine Stops," which really is the ur-text for that specific idea. "The Old Man in the Cave" is the closest Twilight Zone equivalent, since it's specifically about a community that stops thinking for itself and defers entirely to a machine authority.