Are we outsourcing our intelligence?
Are we outsourcing our intelligence?
We used to worry that AI would take our jobs. Perhaps we should worry about something closer to home: what happens to our brains when thinking becomes optional?
When machines do our thinking, what happens to our ability to think?
What if, by creating machines that can think for us, we gradually lose some of our own ability — or willingness — to think?
We know what happens when we stop challenging our muscles. They weaken. Stop practising a language and your fluency deteriorates. Rely entirely on GPS and your sense of direction may become less reliable.
Now consider what we increasingly delegate to AI: remembering information, analysing problems, developing arguments, writing, making decisions and even generating ideas.
These are not merely tasks. They are also ways we exercise our intelligence.
If we outsource the thinking, do we also outsource the practice that keeps us good at it?
An increasingly intelligent world?
Imagine a future in which artificial intelligence becomes extraordinarily sophisticated while humans become increasingly dependent on it for reasoning, judgement and decisions.
We could become more productive without becoming wiser.
More informed without becoming more knowledgeable.
Better at finding answers without becoming better at asking questions.
And increasingly confident in conclusions we haven't actually thought through.
Of course, none of this is inevitable. AI can expand our intellectual capacities, but it can also encourage intellectual laziness. Emerging research suggests that how we use it matters enormously.
Perhaps the real distinction in the future won't be between people who use AI and those who don't.
It will be between those who use AI to avoid thinking and those who use it to think better.
We are investing billions in making artificial intelligence more intelligent.
Are we paying enough attention to what happens to our own?
More productivity. Less thinking?
A 2025 study by Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University surveyed 319 knowledge workers. Those with greater confidence in AI tended to report less critical thinking during AI-assisted tasks.
Another 2025 experiment involving 120 university students found that those who studied using ChatGPT scored 57.5% on a knowledge-retention test 45 days later, compared with 68.5% among students using traditional methods.
Neither study proves that AI makes us less intelligent. But both raise an uncomfortable possibility:
We may become better at completing tasks without becoming better at understanding them.
Or worse, we may confuse the two.
An AI-generated explanation can make us feel remarkably knowledgeable. Until someone asks us to explain it ourselves.
Apparently, having access to intelligence is not quite the same as possessing it.
The paradox
AI could also make us smarter.
A 2025 Harvard experiment found that students using a carefully designed AI tutor learned more in less time than students in an active-learning classroom.
So perhaps the question isn't whether we use AI, but how.
Consider two people using ChatGPT.
The first asks: "Write an essay about the future of humanity."
They receive a polished essay, publish it and move on.
The second asks: "Here is my argument. What am I missing? Where is my reasoning weak? Challenge my assumptions."
One uses AI as a substitute for thinking. The other uses it as a sparring partner.
Same technology. Different intellectual exercise.
The important part isn't that AI produces an answer. It's that we don't allow the answer to end our thinking.
Research references
Lee et al. (2025). The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking. Microsoft Research / Carnegie Mellon University.
Barcaui (2025). ChatGPT as a Cognitive Crutch: Evidence From a Randomized Controlled Trial on Knowledge Retention. Social Sciences & Humanities Open.
Kestin et al. (2025). AI Tutoring Outperforms In-Class Active Learning. Scientific Reports.
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