Is AI making us dumber? It depends on what we let it do

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says writing will make people forgetful: entrusting memories to external signs, they will stop exercising memory. He was partly right. Yet today nobody would give up reading and writing.

Every technology moves a capability out of our heads. The calculator took mental arithmetic, GPS our sense of direction, search engines the need to remember facts. AI moves something more delicate: thinking itself. Writing, arguing, summarising, deciding.

The risk is real

Learning researchers say it clearly: expertise is born from effort. When we ask AI to write the first paragraph for us, summarise the book, find the right argument, we skip exactly the step where the brain learns.

The problem doesn’t show at once. The text is good, the work is done, the time is saved. It shows later, when you must reason unaided, in a meeting, an exam, in front of a client, and realise the muscle isn’t there.

There’s a subtler effect too: AI always offers a plausible, average answer. If we stop forming an opinion before asking, we end up all thinking the same way.

But it isn’t inevitable

The same technology can make us more capable if we change how we use it. One simple question makes the difference: do I want to be able to do this myself?

• If not (formatting a table, transcribing a meeting, finding a reference), delegate guilt-free. It’s time freed.
• If yes (writing well, reasoning about my work, understanding a subject), use AI as a coach: let it question you, correct you, explain, but do the work yourself.

My rules

1. Think first, then ask. On an important matter I write two lines with my own view before asking AI. Then I compare.
2. My draft, its critique. For texts that matter I start. AI rereads, critiques, suggests. Not the other way round.
3. No delegating what I’m learning. If it’s a skill I want, AI quizzes and explains, it doesn’t execute.
4. A little struggle every day. Reading a hard text without a summary, doing a sum by hand, writing a page unaided. It’s the gym.

A note on the “human” subjects

Paradoxically, AI makes the abilities the humanities train more important: reading carefully, arguing, spotting a weak claim, understanding people. They’re exactly what you need to use AI well and to notice when it’s wrong.

In one line

AI doesn’t make us dumber by itself. It makes us dumber if we let it do the thinking, smarter if we let it do the pointless effort.

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