There was a time when information was power. Today, information is everywhere. And that may be precisely the problem. Today, one better understands the statement: “ The more I know, the more I know how little I know. Something that Natural Intelligence tells you.
Google democratised information. Social media democratised opinion. YouTube democratised expertise. And now Artificial Intelligence has democratised something even more dangerous—the appearance of knowledge.
Ask. Prompt. Click. Copy. Summarise. Present.
Done.
It is incredibly easy to get information today. It remains painfully difficult to squeeze knowledge out of it. Harder still is converting knowledge into understanding. And even if you manage that, remaining at the top of your knowledge in these dynamic times is another challenge altogether.
The shelf life of expertise is shrinking.
What you knew yesterday may merely be useful today and dangerously outdated tomorrow.
Vedanta perhaps anticipated the problem long before broadband arrived.
It distinguishes between merely knowing something intellectually and experiencing its truth. Information about fire does not produce heat. Reading a hundred books about swimming does not make you a swimmer. Knowing the recipe does not make you a chef.
Vedanta repeatedly challenges us to move from borrowed knowledge towards realised understanding.
Osho, in his characteristically provocative way, often attacked what he saw as borrowed knowledge. A person may collect scriptures, philosophies and quotations and still remain fundamentally ignorant because the knowledge belongs to someone else.
Rather uncomfortable in the age of AI.
Because today, borrowed intelligence is available on subscription.
AI can write your presentation, summarise your book, analyse your spreadsheet, suggest your strategy, draft your speech, plan your holiday and perhaps even compose the apology after you return late from it.
Wonderful.
I use AI. I enjoy it. I marvel at it.
My worry is not Artificial Intelligence. My worry is Natural Intelligence becoming lazy.
The human mind is wonderfully efficient. Give it an opportunity to avoid work, and it will enthusiastically accept the offer.
Why calculate when the calculator can?
Why remember when Google remembers?
Why read 300 pages when AI can summarise them in 300 words?
Why struggle with a problem when a prompt can produce five solutions before the coffee arrives?
Every individual decision seems perfectly rational.
Collectively, however, we may be quietly outsourcing the mental friction that makes us intelligent. For nearly a century, standardised natural intelligence scores rose with each new generation (the Flynn effect). Recent observations suggest a potential reversal or plateau in sustained attention, reading comprehension, working memory, and logical reasoning
Thinking needs resistance.
Knowledge requires wrestling with information, questioning it, connecting it, rejecting parts of it, arguing with it, experiencing it and occasionally discovering that what you confidently believed yesterday was nonsense.
AI dramatically reduces that friction.
And that is both its greatest advantage and perhaps its hidden danger.
We are already celebrating “prompt engineering” as an important capability. Fair enough. Asking better questions is certainly valuable.
But suppose I become brilliant at prompting machines while progressively losing my ability to solve problems without them?
Then who is becoming intelligent?
The machine or me?
Imagine a circus ringmaster.
He has become exceptionally skilled at managing trained dogs. He gestures, and they jump. He signals, and they roll. He asks, and they perform.
The audience applauds.
Slowly, the ringmaster forgets something.
He once knew how to train lions.
Then one evening, a lion walks into the ring.
No predefined routine. No obedient response. No prompt producing three alternative strategies in 4.7 seconds.
Just a lion.
That is when expertise gets tested.
Real life will continue producing lions—ambiguous situations, ethical dilemmas, incomplete information, contradictory evidence and problems nobody has encountered before.
AI will undoubtedly become more powerful.
The question is whether we will.
Perhaps the real skill of the AI age is therefore not prompting.
It is knowing when not to prompt.
Read the whole book occasionally. Calculate something mentally. Write the first draft yourself. Sit with a difficult question without immediately searching for an answer. Disagree with AI. Challenge it. Make your brain sweat.
Use Artificial Intelligence aggressively.
But exercise Natural Intelligence deliberately.
Because information may be democratised, knowledge may be assisted, and intelligence may increasingly be augmented.
Wisdom still cannot be downloaded.
And when the lion finally enters your ring, hopefully you will remember what to do.
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Image generated by AI (ChatGPT) and first appeared in mxmindia.com
You may want to read HUMAN INTELLIGENCE NEEDS A RE-Boot, and Collective guidelines to monitor Alternate Intelligence!
