Scott Walker: Is AI Making Us Dumb?
By Scott Walker, Founder and CCO, Ferocious
A Ferocious Take on Learning, Laziness, and the Future of Human Intelligence.
There’s a creeping suspicion none of us want to admit, are we outsourcing our intelligence to AI? Not just tasks, but thinking itself?
What started as a tool to make life easier is starting to feel like a crutch. We don’t wrestle with problems anymore; we just prompt them. And every time we do, we skip a crucial part of the process, the struggle, the mess, the connections made in the dark, that actually makes us smarter.
We’ve seen this movie before. GPS killed our sense of direction. Calculators weakened our mental arithmetic. Google stripped us of trivia knowledge. But AI isn’t just taking over memory or maths. It’s taking over the very act of forming thought. It’s answering the questions before we’ve even finished asking them.
The Death of Discovery.
Humanity’s greatest leaps didn’t come from convenience. They came from exploration. Late nights spent digging through library stacks. Random links clicked that led to rabbit holes of unexpected brilliance. Conversations that sparked connections we couldn’t have planned. Now? We’re spoon-fed summarised answers based on what’s already been written, optimised, and indexed.
AI thrives on prediction. It gives us what’s likely, not what’s novel. It turns the pursuit of knowledge into a buffet where you never leave your chair. Comfortable? Yes. Expansive? No.
Research backs this up. Psychologists call it cognitive offloading, the more we rely on tech to store, solve, and decide, the less our brains bother to. Over time, this means sharper tools, duller humans.
The Illusion of Knowledge.
Here’s the trap. AI makes us feel informed. We get neat summaries, bullet points, and frameworks, but what we don’t get is depth. We don’t get the nuance that comes from struggling to understand. We don’t get the creativity that comes from wandering through unrelated material. We get answers. Fast. And speed is very seductive.
But depth of thought isn’t something you can outsource. Neuroscience has shown that real learning is built on friction, the hard work of recalling, connecting, and synthesising information. AI removes the friction, and with it, the process that makes knowledge stick.