AI Won’t Make Us Dumber—It Will Make Us Smarter Than Ever

Imagine a species with extremely limited memory. Each time they needed to multiply even single-digit numbers, they had to start from scratch. To compute 6 × 4, they would painstakingly add 6 four times.

A few individuals had managed to memorize one or two of these simple products, and some experts could recall a handful—perhaps 5 × 4 and 6 × 4. There was even a savant who astonishingly knew all the products of 7. But the full times table—just 100 basic products—was beyond the capacity of any individual.

Over time, their calculations accumulated across countless documents. One enterprising creature gathered these records and compiled a comprehensive times table, embedding it into a simple device. Now, anyone could input two digits and instantly retrieve the product. It was barely even a calculator—just a look-up table—but it revolutionized their world.

Before this, even their most gifted minds had to recompute basic arithmetic over and over. Now, every single one of them, even the least capable, had access to instant multiplication—making them, in effect, far “smarter” than their greatest savant.

This is precisely why we teach children to memorize times tables. Some argue that memorization prevents true understanding, but in reality, it does the opposite: it automates fundamental operations, embedding them at the lowest levels of cognition. This allows multiplication to become a basic building block for more complex thought. Instead of wasting mental energy on elementary calculations, we free our minds for higher-level reasoning.

The creatures in this story lacked the memory to do the same. Instead, they required “big data” compiled from their own history of calculations to create their automated times-table machine.

AI is Doing the Same for Us

Today’s AI serves the same role—at a vastly greater scale.

There are countless tasks that we humans, as individuals, must re-compute every time we face them. Some experts can do these tasks faster, just as the multiplication savant could recall the sevens. A PR professional can craft a press release in minutes, while a cryptography expert can write secure code in a fraction of the time it would take an outsider. These experts don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time because they have absorbed so much knowledge in their domains. Their expertise is the result of years of internalizing patterns, formulas, and structures, allowing them to automate much of their thought process.

But even the best human experts have limits. There are far too many rote, stereotyped tasks across all domains for any one person—or even all people collectively—to master.

That’s where AI comes in.

By ingesting the vast, incidental record of human knowledge—from books, codebases, articles, conversations, and historical archives—large language models effectively construct an immense “lookup table” for all the stereotyped tasks humans have performed over time. They don’t think as we do, but they offer instant access to the accumulated patterns of human cognition.

A New Era of Thought

This does not stifle intellectual development; it accelerates it.

The invention of calculators didn’t make mathematicians obsolete—it freed them from tedious arithmetic, allowing them to focus on deeper problems in physics, engineering, and economics. Likewise, AI is offloading repetitive cognitive labor, letting us work with richer “thinking atoms”—precomputed building blocks that enable new, more complex insights.

Those who embrace AI as an extension of their cognition will not become dumber; they will become sharper, more efficient, and capable of intellectual feats that were previously unimaginable.

Today’s AI won’t halt our intellectual development.

Today’s AI will catapult it.