Will using AI make humans dumb?

I caught myself doing something the other day that I am a little embarrassed to admit.

I had to write a simple email. Nothing hard. A couple of sentences, the kind I have written a thousand times. And before my fingers had even touched the keyboard, I had already opened AI to write it for me.

Not because I could not do it myself. Because it was faster. Cleaner. Done in ten seconds, and no effort from me at all. I understand why I did it — it is efficient, and efficiency is hard to argue with.

I sat there for a second and thought: when did I stop doing this myself?

That is the question that has been following me around since. Will using AI make humans dumb?

Now, before you answer — I know what you are thinking. Every generation has had this panic. My parents’ generation worried the calculator would ruin children’s maths. Before that, people worried the telephone would ruin conversation. Before that, somebody probably worried the printing press would ruin memory. And here we all are, still thinking, still talking, still remembering things.

So maybe this is just the same old fear in new clothes?

Maybe. But something about this one feels different to me, and I want to be honest about why.

There was a time when we had phone numbers memorised. Not all of them, but at least some — and we never had to open the phone book. Then the phone came, and slowly we started to forget those numbers.

Did the phone make me dumb? Or did it just take over a job my memory used to do, and my memory quietly retired?

Same with directions. I used to learn a route by driving it wrong twice and then knowing it forever. Now I follow the blue line and arrive knowing nothing about the streets I just drove through. I got there faster. Did I get there smarter?

I keep coming back to the muscle idea. You know the saying — use it or lose it. That is true for legs and it might be true for brains. If I never memorise a number, the part of me that once kept a whole phone diary in my head gets rusty. If I always follow the blue line, the part of me that learns a route and reads the streets gets weak.

But here is the other side, and I have to give it its due. Nobody misses memorising phone numbers. That was not deep thinking — that was storage. And storage is exactly what machines are good at. When the calculator took over long division, we did not get dumber. We got to spend that time on harder problems. Maybe AI is the same. Maybe it takes the routine thinking off my plate so I can do the thinking only a human can do.

That is the hopeful version. And some days I believe it.

Other days I watch myself reach for AI before I have even tried — before I have sat with a problem for five minutes, before I have let my own brain have a go — and I wonder if I am training myself out of trying.

I think that is the real question. Not whether the tool makes us dumb. The tool does not decide anything. The question is what we do with the space it frees up.

If I use AI to skip the boring parts and then spend the saved time thinking harder about the interesting parts, I come out ahead. If I use it to skip the thinking altogether, then yes, slowly, quietly, I probably do get dumber. Not in one dramatic moment. In a hundred small ones, like handing over an email I could have written in my sleep. That is the flip side of the efficiency — every small job I hand over is a small job my own brain no longer practises.

So I have made myself a small rule. Before I ask AI anything, I give my own brain a first try. Five minutes. A rough draft in my head. A guess at the answer. Sometimes the guess is wrong, and that is fine — being wrong is how the muscle grows.

And when I do ask, I read the answer properly. I argue with it. I check it. I do not just copy it and move on. That is the difference between using a tool and handing your brain over to one.

I could be wrong about all of this. Maybe in ten years we will look back and laugh at how worried we were, the same way we laugh at the calculator panic. Or maybe we will look back and wish we had been more careful.

What do you think? Is there something you used to do in your head that you now hand to a machine without thinking — a phone number, a route, a first draft? And be honest: do you miss doing it, or are you glad it is gone?

Tell me in the comments. I am still making up my mind on this one, and I would rather hear it from you than from a machine.

I make short videos about things like this on the Plug n Read YouTube channel. If you want the bigger story, here is the full history of AI in ten minutes:

And every day there is a new Today’s Read — one thing I read or observed, explained in under a minute. Watch them here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJwXhgYKzTeE