Technology made us dumber, weaker & incapable.
For example, agriculture and the wonders of the Green Revolution brought cheap + convenient + abundant food.
And we are now so fat we must fight obesity.
AI makes thinking just as cheap, convenient, and abundant.
So what will happen to our intelligence?
If we need to go to the gym today to work out and burn our cheap and abundant calories, do we now need to go to mental gyms for our brains?
I wrote this guide to answer it.
For my own sanity, in a post-AI world.
Sharing is caring. Share this with someone who is scared of getting dumber because of AI. That person is both right and wrong. I’ll cover both.
1. Eyeglasses Do Not Make You Blind.
Technology isn’t automatically making you a bad human.
Eyeglasses do not make you blind.
Writing made memory less important, but we are accumulating knowledge like never before.
Calculators made mathematicians better. Not worse.
GPS makes traveling safe. Imagine a plane without GPS.
AI can answer, sure, but also teach.
The variable is not convenience itself.
But some convenience, once eliminated, also wipes out repetition, attention, error correction, retrieval, senses, and learning.
The things that make you a functioning human.
Here are some examples:
An ultra-processed diet caused people to consume 508 ± 106 additional kcal/day and gain about 0.9 kg in two weeks, while the same participants lost roughly 0.9 kg on the unprocessed diet.
And we struggle to expend these new calories because we move less. So energy ( = calories) became easier to get while becoming less necessary to expend. [1]
The cognitive analogy is stronger with GPS and AI.
A small three-year study found that heavier GPS use was linked to faster decline in spatial memory. [2] The more you use a GPS, the less you can navigate by yourself. Ouch.
What about AI? In a 2025 randomized experiment with 1,000+ high-school math students, ChatGPT improved performance by 48%. But when the AI was removed, those students scored 17% worse than the control group.
The lesson is simple: the task got easier faster than the student got better.
But when ChatGPT was only a tutor, performance jumped 127% without the same drop afterward. [3]
So AI makes it easy to answer, so fast, you don’t have time to learn. But if you use AI to learn, you outperform everyone else.
Medicine too. After experienced doctors began using AI to detect polyps during colonoscopies, their detection rate without AI fell from 28.4% to 22.4%. [4]
This problem existed before AI. Airline pilots using highly automated cockpits kept their basic flying skills fairly well. But they became worse at tasks the automation usually handled: knowing their position without a map, planning the next navigation step, and diagnosing instrument failures. Regulators therefore recommend that pilots regularly practice flying manually. [5]
Memory shows the same pattern. When people know information will remain available on a computer, they remember less of the information itself and more about where to find it. Taking photos can have a similar effect: people who photographed museum objects later remembered those objects and their locations less well than people who simply looked at them. [6]
Our senses can change in the same way. What we repeatedly practice noticing becomes easier to detect and describe. Hunter-gatherers in Malaysia could name smells about as easily as colors, unlike a closely related farming population living in a similar environment. In another study, five months on a low-salt diet made people more sensitive to salt and reduced how salty they preferred their food. What we repeatedly use, we become better at sensing. [7]
Cheap calories let us consume more while moving less. Cheap cognition lets us produce better answers while thinking less. In both cases, the immediate result can improve while the underlying human ability gets less practice.
But there is a twist:
Offloading is not the same as losing a skill.
It becomes deskilling when we stop practicing a skill we still need, and perform worse when the tool is removed.
The point of this newsletter is to make sure AI benefits us.
And how.
I mean, I literally called this newsletter “How to AI”.
I am just like you. I do not want to get dumber because of AI.
Upgrade today to join our Community.
2. The “use-it-or-lose-it” test
To test whether a technology is causing loss of a skill, ask four questions.
First: what did you have to do before?
You might have had to walk, remember a phone number, build a mental map, spot cancer, solve a calculation, read the weather, navigate by stars, cook from raw ingredients, find a partner through friends, or fly a plane manually.
Second: and now what does technology do for you?
Cars replace walking. Processed food replaces preparation. Search engines store information. Cameras store memories. GPS chooses routes. Dating apps find and filter people. Autopilots control flight paths.
How many phone numbers do you remember? Mine. And my mom.
And now AI comes for our thinking.
Third: do you still practice?
A tool can make us better if it helps us practice. But if it does the task before we do, you won’t practice, so you end up losing the skill.
Fourth: what if the tool disappears?
Let’s say the tool disappears.
If you’re now worse than before = problem.
And with AI, it’s already happening.
I saw this Reddit post the other day, and I had chills:
I assign a profile essay. Have for 30 years. Student interviews a person, records it, writes a paper based off the recording. Citations are timestamps. Should be pretty easy. Has been easy pre-AI.
Now, students cannot do it.
I get so many requests for alternative assignments. Students claim they don’t know anyone. Claim anxiety. Want a list of questions from me.
Even after the interview:
Student: “So, what do I put in the paper?”
Teacher: “Information from the interview.”
“Yeah, but what parts?”
“You have to decide that.”
“But how?”
“Start with what you found interesting.”
“How do I know if something’s interesting?”
“You’re asking me how you find something interesting?”
Kids can’t know if something is interesting because AI did not tell them if it was. Is this it? The end?
Now wait. Not everything is lost.
We can still use AI to our benefit.
Most of this newsletter stays free because people like you share it with people they love & respect. Be one of them.
3. Zero-Effort Thinking & Meat Proxy.
The danger is not cheap intelligence.
It is zero-effort thinking.
If you indulge, not only will your brain and intelligence suffer, but you’ll perform workslop. San Francisco invented a new word for you: you are a meat proxy.
So how do we get to choose when to AI and when not to AI?
When the goal is output → automate aggressively.
When the goal is learning → make the user (you?) predict, draft, recall, explain, decide, and correct mistakes before showing the final answer.
In practice: instead of asking AI what strategy to choose, tell the AI the many strategies you thought of → if there is any you didn’t think of → explore each one's pros and cons → be the pilot, not the assisted passenger seat.
I gave it a thought. I searched. I shared where my brain is going. What I want to validate and where I might need to take a step back. AI is a partner, not the single source of truth.
Because no, you can’t escape AI.
AI keeps getting better & cheaper, faster.
You think AI is getting more expensive because of Claude-Fable-5 or companies that keep spending more and more? You’re thinking about it wrong.
AI is thinking for us, more and more.
And that thinking is getting cheaper and cheaper. More and more abundant. So convenient it’s almost impossible to avoid it.
Just like we go to the gym to work out, we might have to work out with our brains to still be sharp. Thinking right can’t be outsourced entirely.
A gym puts physical effort back into a world that no longer requires much of it. We may soon need cognitive gyms that deliberately restore memory, calculation, navigation, writing, judgment, diagnosis, social interaction, and problem solving after AI makes much of that effort unnecessary.
So I built a mental gym for staying relevant as humans.
First, copy the secret password here: