You'll learn nothing and be happy

For most of human history, knowledge work required actual work.

Thinking, doing, repeating. You worked, you solved problems, you got better. But that is all changing.

When you have a “super intelligence” in your pocket, it’s tempting to skip the hard stuff. When you have a task to complete, instead of using your brain to solve it yourself and endure the frustration of the work, you just ask your buddy Claude.

Why do math yourself when you have a calculator?

The problem is that AI isn’t just replacing a single skill, it’s replacing thinking itself.

And the long-term effects of that will be profound.

Outsource it all and drink cocktails on the beach

The more we defer to AI, the dumber we get.

A research task used to mean thinking, analysing, taking notes, and organising information, then connecting the dots, and making sense of it all. You would verify sources and make a lot of judgement calls along the way.

Now, you just fire a prompt into Claude and get a 10 page report (which you probably won’t even read).

Generative AI has corrupted writing.

Writing takes work. It takes thinking. You learn what you actually want to say by doing it. You sharpen your message, you learn a skill. But now you can dump any half-baked idea into Claude and get polished sounding copy. And it shows.

The skill of thinking, of being discerning, slowly but surely erodes.

But the real problem isn’t in the erosion, it’s never learning in the first place.

You’ll learn nothing and be happy

Numerous concerning stories highlight the issue.

A new grad, 20-something years old, joins a company. She’s briefed a research task. She returns a report too fast, too long and… wrong. She’s asked about her approach:

“Well…I just used CoPilot”

A similar story from a teacher friend:

A class full of 19/20-year-old marketing students use AI for everything. Every task and every assignment covered in ChatGPTs grubby fingerprints. They’re asked about the content and the issue becomes clear:

They are not learning anything.

They’re optimising for task completion but learning nothing in the process.

Generations who grow up with AI will learn to defer to it for everything. Those of us who’ve lived a life without AI have learned real world skills we apply to it. But what happens to those who never learn the skills in the first place?

They become machine operators.

The canary in the coal mine

If education doesn’t fundamentally shift, we risk ushering in a generation of mindless drones who cannot function without AI. People who defer to AI as an oracle, who lose faith in their own abilities, who outsource everything to AI models built on the outputs of human work and owned by big tech companies.

Fortunately, there seems to be some examples of the necessary shifts in education.

I recently saw an example from China. The professor knew the students would use AI, so instead of fighting it, he changed the nature of the task.

The students entered the brief into AI. The objective goal was to evaluate AI’s answers and point out where it was wrong. They had to challenge its thinking and find the holes. To do their own research and verify the information.

The task taught them to be aware of the risks of AI and use their own brains to challenge it. This is the skill we need to navigate this new era. Critical thinking is more important than ever.

I’m not anti-AI — I use it a lot and see a lot of benefits (especially for work). But it is transforming life as we know it in many ways. If we don’t surface the issues and find solutions for them, there are real risks. This is just one of them.

So, embrace the imperfections of being human. Use AI to assist, but not to replace your thinking. Do the hard stuff and keep your mind sharp.

I could have written this much faster (and maybe better) with AI. But I refuse to let AI write my own words. Because the process is more important than the outcome. Task completion and efficiency is not the only goal.

What do you think? Is AI dumbing you down? Are the future generations doomed, or is this just another technological shift? Let me know.

Adrian