Everyone is afraid AI will make us lazy. It's doing the opposite to me.
For the past year, my brain has felt sore. Not from stress but from use. I'm thinking more deeply, processing more, and considering angles I never would have reached on my own. And in the midst of this change, I've been trying to find the right way to describe what's actually happening.
I found it in a story about Steve Jobs.
While reading Walter Isaacson's biography, I paused at the part where Jobs called the first Apple computer "a bicycle for the mind." The reference comes from a Scientific American study that measured locomotion efficiency across species. Humans ranked remarkably low. The condor won. But when they tested a human on a bicycle, the human blew the condor out of the sky (no pun intended!). This moved Jobs; he saw it as proof that humans are tool builders and that the right tool exponentially amplifies what we're already capable of. He loved the concept so much he almost named the first Macintosh "the Bicycle." I’m glad that name didn’t catch on, by the way!
That story clicked. It's exactly what I've been feeling.
Right now, there is a very dominant narrative that AI is going to turn our brains to mush. The fear is that many are tasking AI to do the things they would otherwise have to think about. This seems to be the case for some applications, but maybe it only applies to those who like to cut corners by nature anyway, and this is just another powerful way to do so.
AI hasn't made me lazier. It’s put my brain on a race bike, riding in the peloton in the Tour de France.
Before AI, the journey from an idea to a finished solution was purely linear. Limited by my knowledge and abilities, mildly enriched by my research and learning. With AI, it's omni-directional instead. AI can hand me a massive amount of research and data in minutes. But here's the catch: I still have to understand it. The machine isn't learning for me; it's just firing raw material at me with a t-shirt cannon. My mind is working like crazy, pedaling as fast as it can just to consume, synthesize, and keep up with the sheer velocity of information the AI is serving up.
Then, when I’m developing an idea, I use AI as a relentless, untiring intellectual sparring partner. I throw a half-baked concept at it and say, "Tear this apart." I ask for the pros and cons. I ask it to weigh my idea against existing research, stress-test the edges of my logic, and point out the glaring variables I entirely ignored. So, my idea goes through sets of roundtable discussions to be reconsidered, tested, and developed much further than I could alone.
Realize this about a bicycle: if you sit on it and do nothing, you’ll fall. It won’t do anything. But if you actually put in the energy, the gears and levers multiply your effort, allowing you to travel further and faster than your own two legs could ever take you alone.
AI is the exact same mechanism. Will you use it to avoid work? Or will you use it to amplify your curiosity? If you pedal hard, it will push your cognitive limits. I am thinking deeper, considering weirder angles, and processing more information than at any other point in my life.
I loved how Steve Jobs saw the computer as the bicycle for the mind. To me, AI is the next bicycle for the mind.
How hard are you pedaling?