AI: When we stop doing, we stop knowing. Then what?
I’ve never believed the line “you don’t need to know things, you just need to know where to find them.”
I’m not defending rote memorization. But creativity, problem solving, ideas - they don’t appear in a vacuum. They come from what already lives in your head. From knowledge and imagination colliding until something new emerges. If nothing’s there, nothing connects. You don’t even see the problems worth solving.
I think that was true before AI. And it still is.
Big shifts reshape everyone
Some say AI will make us smarter. Others say it will make us dumber. There’s truth in both.
Take another big shift in recent years - the rise of social media. On the surface, it gave us connection, speed, access to communities that never existed before. But the net impact, in my view, has been mostly negative so far.
Social media reshaped how the brain works: shrinking attention spans, hijacking dopamine loops, fueling anxiety. It polarized societies, spread misinformation at scale, rewarded outrage over nuance, and replaced deep interactions with shallow ones. Anonymity encouraged behavior that in real life would never pass.
We told ourselves it depends how you use it. But at the level of society, the effect was unavoidable.
When skills are outsourced
AI could probably follow a similar path. Yes, it makes us faster, more efficient, more capable of delivering tasks - this time, I’m not going to get into a discussion about whether those tasks matter or not, you know what I think of the efficiency trap.
But what happens to the brain when more of its work is outsourced? What happens when it’s outsourced at scale - across society, in every field, in every interaction?
Something will change. Something always does. And it won’t just be individual skill that fades. It will be a collective shift in what people are capable of, what they notice, what they even think to question.
Think of navigation. Once, we built mental maps. Now, without GPS, many people are helpless. The skill is gone. Outsourced.
Think of The Matrix. Morpheus says: “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. That’s the essence. Downloading knowledge isn’t the same as living it. Skills are not built by shortcuts, but by doing, failing, and trying again.
What keeps us human
Take writing an essay. I don’t want to argue whether essays have meaning in themselves. The point is different: an essay represents a skill. If you’ve built that ability, AI is your assistant. You know what good looks like, you have a benchmark, an opinion, a sense of quality - and also perspective, knowledge, experience, taste. You can judge whether what AI created is good enough, or whether it needs to be improved. If you’ve never built that skill, you have nothing to compare to.
I’m a realist. Technology always moves forward. Some abilities vanish, others appear. But the net impact isn’t neutral. Not with social media. Not with AI.
And maybe that’s the real question: Not how fast we can go with AI - but what we still want to be capable of without it.