AI: ARE WE GETTING SMARTER, OR JUST MORE DEPENDENT?

I had a really interesting conversation with my two son-in-laws the other day about AI. One of them is a coder and also has a degree in nuclear engineering. He uses AI in his job all the time, so this isn’t somebody who is afraid of technology or doesn’t understand it. Quite the opposite.

What was interesting was how differently we looked at AI.

I’m approaching 70 years old. I didn’t go through life as an academic. I wasn’t a big reader, I didn’t spend years studying complicated subjects, and most of what I learned came from business, dealing with people and just plain old life experience.

So when AI came along, I looked at it as this incredible opening of doors.

All of a sudden I can ask questions about history, science, medicine, economics, cars, politics, whatever happens to be running through my head at 4 o’clock in the morning. LOL. And I can keep asking questions until I actually understand it.

To me, that’s amazing.

But my son-in-law sees another side of it.

His concern is what happens to young people when AI becomes so easy and so good that they no longer have to put in the work to learn something.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized he has a point.

There is a HUGE difference between using AI to increase your knowledge and using AI to replace your knowledge.

Think about where this could be 10 or 15 years from now.

A kid grows up with AI doing everything. It writes the paper. Solves the math problem. Fixes the grammar. Does the research. Gives directions. Explains how to repair something. Tells you what something means. Maybe eventually it does half the thinking required in your job.

You can become incredibly good at getting answers without necessarily knowing very much yourself.

Now imagine something happens.

A war. A massive cyberattack. A major failure of the electrical grid. A natural disaster. Some kind of communications breakdown we can’t even imagine today.

And AI isn’t available.

Not for an hour.

Not because your Wi-Fi went down.

Maybe for weeks or months.

Then what?

That’s the part that scares me.

We could potentially create an entire generation of people who are incredibly capable when connected to technology but surprisingly helpless when disconnected from it.

We already see a small version of this with GPS.

Take GPS away from a lot of people today and tell them to drive somewhere they’ve never been. Some wouldn’t know where to begin. People my age remember throwing a road map across the hood of the car and figuring it out.

That doesn’t mean GPS is bad. GPS is fantastic.

The mistake would have been never learning how to navigate in the first place.

And AI could be the same thing, except instead of replacing our ability to read a map, it could start replacing our ability to THINK.

That’s a much bigger deal.

And here’s the strange part.

If something like that ever happened 15 years from now, the 25- or 30-year-old might actually be at a disadvantage compared with somebody much older who grew up before all of this existed.

The older person has something stored between their ears that doesn’t require Wi-Fi, electricity or a subscription.

Life experience.

We know how to figure things out because for most of our lives we had no other choice.

But I don’t think the answer is keeping AI away from young people. That would be ridiculous. AI may become one of the greatest educational tools mankind has ever created.

The answer is teaching young people how to use it without becoming dependent on it.

Learn the math.

Then use the calculator.

Learn how to write.

Then use AI to make your writing better.

Learn how to research.

Then use AI to help you research faster.

Learn how to solve a problem.

Then let AI help you solve bigger ones.

Because there’s a big difference between AI making you smarter and AI simply doing your thinking for you.

Maybe the best comparison is flying an airplane.

We don’t tell pilots not to use autopilot. Of course they should use it. It’s an incredible tool.

But you’d better know how to fly the damn airplane when the autopilot stops working.

Maybe that’s exactly how we need to start thinking about AI.

Use it.

Learn from it.

Take advantage of everything it can do.

But never surrender your ability to think without it.

Because technology has a funny way of making things easier right up until the day it isn’t there.

And on that day, the smartest person in the room might not be the person who knew how to use AI the best.

It might be the person who still knows what to do when it’s gone.