What We Lose When the Machine Thinks for Us

The greatest danger of artificial intelligence is not that it will learn to think. The danger is that we will learn to stop thinking. For most of human history, reaching an answer meant traveling a road. It meant remembering, searching, comparing, trying, failing, erasing, starting again. We didn't always arrive at the right answer, but along the way something just as important happened: we learned to think.Now, for the first time, it is sometimes possible to receive the result without traveling the road. We can type a few words and get back a finished text. Ask a question and get back a polished answer. Request a summary instead of reading, a recommendation instead of deliberating, a solution instead of searching for one.And this is wonderful.It is also why it's dangerous.If artificial intelligence were a poor tool, we probably wouldn't entrust it with much. We'd check it, correct it, doubt its answers. It is precisely as it grows better, faster, more persuasive, that it becomes easier to give up the effort that used to come before the result.The danger doesn't begin when the machine is wrong. It may begin precisely when it's right. Say we have to write an essay. We can sit before a blank page, search for the first sentence, cross it out, rephrase, discover midway through that our idea isn't as clear as we thought, and finally arrive at a thought that didn't exist when we began. Or we can simply ask the machine to write it.Its result may well be better. It will certainly be faster. But one thing won't happen: the road along which our own thought could have been built.It's a distinction easy to miss in an age that measures almost everything by results.We see the text that got written, the problem that got solved, the time that got saved. It's much harder to see the question we didn't ask, the idea we never tried to develop, the memory we didn't strain to retrieve, the deliberation we never went through.This surrender almost never feels like surrender.At first we ask artificial intelligence to phrase a sentence we struggle to phrase.Then a paragraph.Then a whole text.Until a moment comes when we no longer ask ourselves how we would have written it alone.This is how habits form. Not out of a decision to stop thinking, but out of a wish so human, so natural, to save time and effort.And this, perhaps, is the most troubling part of all: a person doesn't have to lose the capacity to think in order to use it less. He can remain intelligent, educated, capable of judgment — and still grow accustomed to someone else phrasing for him, summarizing for him, remembering for him, comparing for him, and, in time, recommending to him what to do and what to think.As long as the machine sits beside him, no one may even notice that anything has changed. On the contrary: the results may well improve.He will write faster.Know more.Err less.Decide faster.From the outside, all of it will look like progress.But reason is not only the ability to reach the right answer. It is also the ability to bear the road that leads there: to remain a while inside uncertainty, to sit with difficulty, to be wrong, to doubt, to change our minds, and in the end, to decide for ourselves what we think.Artificial intelligence may be one of the greatest tools humanity has ever made for extending that reason. The question is not whether to use it. We will use it, and rightly so.The question is what we choose to keep doing ourselves, even once we no longer have to.Because there are things we do not only for the sake of what they produce, but because doing them builds something in us.We remember – and so experience is formed.We doubt – and so we learn what to believe.We deliberate – and so we discover what matters to us.We decide – and so we learn to bear responsibility.And we think not only to find answers.We think in order to remain human beings who think.So perhaps the great question of the age of artificial intelligence will not be whether machines learn to think like us.But whether we go on thinking, once machines can already do it in our place.