The Problem of AI

I’m not a fast reader.

Every morning, I sit down to read, and it’s always a battle. I’ll read through a paragraph and immediately find my mind wandering off. "What do I need to get done today? I’m hungry!" I’ll catch myself and stop, look again at the page, and realize I have no idea what I just read. Then I have to go back and start all over.

In an age of AI where you can instantly generate summaries, this might feel like a waste of time. But I know I’m doing myself a favor.

The human brain is the most magnificent tool in the history of the universe. It is a miracle of evolution. Think about where we were 1,000 years ago compared to now, from the advancements in science, to the complexity of our literature, and the sheer power of our technology. It’s just mind-boggling to think about what the human brain can accomplish.

But I have a growing fear that this power is under threat. We are becoming incredibly lazy.

When I read deeply, I am doing more than just consuming information. I am taking someone else’s thoughts, processing them through my own system, and wrestling with them until they become my own. It is a process of deep thinking, then thinking again, and then thinking even more. This process build skills, a specific kind of mental complexity.

But if we stop doing that–if we become so lazy that we don’t learn how to write, how to organize our ideas, or how to learn a new language–the brain begins to atrophy. We become superficial, unable to reason our way through complex problems because we’ve outsourced the thinking part of our lives to a machine.

I worry about a future fifty or a hundred years from now. We will always need experts who truly know their field: people who can build bridges, design cities, and lead movements. But if those people stop thinking for themselves and start relying entirely on tools to do the heavy lifting, we are going to be in an incredible mess.

Since the beginning of time, humans have used tools. A hammer extends our strength and a telescope allows us to see the universe, not with our naked eyes, but through a piece of brilliant technology. Tools are supposed to be an extension of who we are. It increases our power.

"Am I using the tool, or is the tool using me? Am I the one in control?" AI will simply become an everyday part of us. We have to learn how to embrace it.