Is AI Making Us Dumber?

Keep the struggle that's actually you and give away the rest. That's the answer. Guard the thinking that builds you, the wrestling of feeling into words, the sitting with a hard problem until it yields, the slow forming of a real view you'd stand behind, and let the machine have the dead work that was never making you anyway. That's the whole instruction. You could stop the episode here and you'd have it all. But you won't though, and it won't be for lack of understanding.

Living it is almost impossible, and the rest of what I have to say is about why. Now let's start with how innocent this loss looks, because nobody decides intentionally to stop thinking. What happens is much slower. There's a message that you've been turning over a discomfort in the unknowing, and rather than sit with it, you ask a machine, and it hands you something reasonable in three seconds. A decision that you can weigh a thing to summarize a problem you don't immediately understand.

At each time, there's now a faster route that skips the part where you have to think. And every one of those choices is reasonable or it appears reasonable. That's what makes it so hard to see. You're not being intentionally lazy. You say you're being efficient, and the world keeps telling you that efficiency is the whole point. Look hard at the word doing the persuading here. Convenience. It's offered to you as a pure gift, a thing taken off your plate, friction removed for your benefit.

But convenience was never designed for your flourishing. It was designed to move the very effort that was building you into who you truly are, and to make the removal feel like a kindness so you'd never even resist it. The product is sold as serving you. What it's actually serving is its own use. The more of your thinking it does for you, the more indispensable it becomes to you. The prevailing line splits between people who say this is pure upside.

The next calculator, nothing to fear. And people who say we're getting dumber and the studies agree both are beside the point. Because this was never about how smart you are. It's about something the word smart doesn't touch. What's actually draining out is the thing the struggle was building. You've come to treat the difficulty as a friction to be engineered out of your life whenever you come up against it. And here's the trade that the word convenience is hiding.

Convenience saves you time. It also costs you struggle. And the struggle was the part that has made you up until now. You're told you're only losing the first thing, the minutes, the effort you didn't want anyway. When you're handing over the third, on the surface engineering our difficulty seems obviously right. Who wants things needlessly difficult in life? But the struggle was never just the price you paid for the answer.

The struggle was the thing that was making you. When you sit with a problem you can't immediately solve. When you hold confusion and duality without collapsing into it. When you can wrestle a vague feeling into actual words that effort isn't waste on the way to the result. The effort is where a self gets built. That's the forge. Skip it because a machine will hand you the output and you get the output and miss the forging.

And the forging was the part that was always yours. Which is exactly why the phrase just keep the struggle that's yours is so much harder than it sounds. The skip is invisible and it feels like progress every single time. Every time you ask AI to write the email you didn't quite know how to phrase you get the finished thought without ever doing the thinking. That's the trade and it's almost invisible because the words on the screen look the same either way.

But the person who fought their way to an idea and the person who has handed it on a silver platter are not in the same place even when they're holding identical sentences. One of them grew. The other one just received and a life made entirely of receiving. However polished the delivery is slowly empties out the person during the receiving. Why is it so hard to keep what's yours? Because of a pattern that runs through far more than this.

There's a certain thing that only has value because it costs you something. Understanding you struggle toward a skill you built through 10,000 clumsy repetitions. A conviction you arrived at by being wrong for many years first. These can't be transferred and they can't be downloaded and they can't be outsourced because the cost wasn't incidental to them. The cost was what made them real. You take the cost out and you don't get the same thing for free.

You get a very convincing imitation. An answer shaped object with no understanding inside of it. And you lose then the ability to tell the difference including in yourself. That's the trap waiting behind the simple prompt. The machine doesn't refuse you the thing. It hands you something shaped exactly like the thing for free. And let you forget there was ever a difference. When AI hands you the essay, the summary, the decision, the email, the text messages, the perfectly worded reply.

It's a reward that costs you nothing and gives you nothing to be. When AI hands you the essay, the summary, the email, the text message, the decision, the perfectly worded reply. A reward that costs you nothing gives you nothing to be. You can collect all of it and still feel underneath the convenience, emptier each time because none of it deposited anything in you. The machine did the becoming and handed you the end result.

And you can't build itself out of artifacts you didn't make. You can only build one out of the struggles you actually walked through yourself. There's a reason this one slips past you when the calculator panic didn't. People will tell you it's just the old fee and it's not quite just the old fee. A calculator took over a narrow mechanical task and left the thinking to you. You still had to know which sum to do and what the answer meant and how you got to the answer.

What's offered now isn't a tool for a task. It's a substitute for the act of forming a thought at all. The framing, the wrestling, the internal conflict, the working out of what you even believe. And because the thing it hands back is fluent and articulate and confident and often shaped exactly like your own thinking might have been. You can lose the habit of original thought without ever feeling the loss. The way a muscle you stop using doesn't ache it just goes.

The danger was never that the machine could be wrong. The danger is that it'll be good enough, often enough, that you stop noticing you've handed over the one activity that was keeping a mind alive in you. So when I tell you to keep what's yours understand what you're up against. You won't feel the moment you've let go. There's no ache, there's no alarm. You have to choose the friction that makes you on purpose in a world that will frictionlessly do it all for you.

While the last day is invisible and the convenience feels like a gift of ease every single time. The rarest thing in the years to come won't be intelligence which machines now have in abundance. It'll be a person who is genuinely the author of their own mind. AI can produce everything a thinker produces. What he can never do is be a person who actually did the thinking. Someone with hard one understanding, real judgment from real wisdom, a centre that was built across years and not installed in a second.

That's the one thing the convenience can't give you because it's made of exactly the cost the convenience removed. So the real question of this whole time isn't how to keep up with the machines. It's how to stay the kind of person they can't replace. And that was never a skill you acquire. It's a self you refuse to outsource. I went much further into this exact question. What it actually means to become something a machine can't replace.

And what gets quietly emptied out when nothing in your life is allowed to be hard. If anything in this episode made you want to explore what you just heard, I've made it easy for you to do so. In the show notes, there's a link to access a book called Before Approaching the Threshold, which is the gateway into this work. Alongside this, you'll also receive a free 14 day access to the Atlas and intelligence trained on everything written and recorded in this body of work.

And it's there to think alongside you on whatever you're actually sitting with. Both are free to start. And the link to access them is in the show notes. This was Michael Loria. And you're listening to the architect speaks.