I read something last week that I haven't been able to shake.
Are you using AI to think faster or to think less?
Because those are two completely different things, and they lead to completely different people five years from now.
I've been watching how people use these tools, and there's a clear split forming. Some people use AI as a sparring partner; they throw a half-formed idea at it, argue with the output, push back, and refine. The AI makes their thinking sharper. They're still the only ones thinking.
Others use it to skip the thinking entirely. Draft this email. Summarise this. Write this post. And it works, technically. The output is fine. But something doesn't transfer. The struggle of forming your own argument is where the understanding actually lives.
Nicholas Carr wrote about this with Google, the argument being that when you outsource memory and retrieval, the brain stops building the connective tissue between ideas. You get faster access to information and a slower ability to generate insight.
Here's the fork.
If you're using AI and feel sharper than you were a year ago, you're probably in the first camp. The tool is serving the thinking.
If you're using AI and feel slightly more dependent or slightly less confident forming an opinion from scratch, it's worth paying attention to that.
The question isn't whether to use the tools. It's whether you'd still be able to think clearly if they disappeared tomorrow.
Because leverage without understanding is just a faster way to be wrong at scale.