You have to do the work yourself

Calvisius Sabinus was a rich Roman who desired to appear learned without doing the actual mental work. So he devised a shortcut to learning: He bought educated slaves at high prices. To impress his guests, he kept his slaves at the foot of his couch and asked them for poetry verses to repeat. Alas, he often got stuck in the middle of a word.

He thought because he owned knowledgeable slaves, he owned the knowledge itself. To which, Seneca wrote, "No man is able to borrow or buy a sound mind." With the advances in AI, it is tempting to fall into the same trap: We think because we can get answers to almost anything in seconds, we are knowledgeable. But having the information is not the same as knowing, understanding, and acting on it.

Even before ChatGPT, we had Google, which gave us access to information that our parents' generation could only dream of. But we were taught to visit a few websites, compare the information, and make an assessment ourselves—which, while slower, is a valuable skill. Nowadays, many people outsource the tedious work to AI and call it a day.

Don't get me wrong, I use AI every day to help me with learning, research, and coding. The danger is outsourcing all the thinking to AI and believing that makes us knowledgeable. Just the other day, I was conversing back and forth with Claude, hoping to refine my business model. After getting frustrated at its responses and going nowhere, I realized I just had to pick up the pen and think on my notebook through writing and drawing. AI can help but we owe it to ourselves to do the thinking.

When Sabinus' guest suggested he try wrestling, he countered that he was too thin and weak. The witty guest responded, "Don’t say that, I implore you. Consider how many perfectly healthy slaves you have!" Just as having healthy slaves doesn't make us healthy, being able to ask ChatGPT for answers doesn't make us knowledgeable.

Parents are starting to worry that with AI, our children won't know how to read and learn. The decline is already happening. So, it's all the more important that we model it for our children. We have to do the work ourselves.