Before I used Google Maps regularly, I would be more aware of road layout while driving and soon become capable of navigating any town I visited regularly, without a map. It’s weird to drive through a place I last visited twenty years ago, knowing that last time I was there I’d navigate based on memory, but now I’m completely leaning on that device to do it for me. That mental faculty might not be completely lost, but I don’t use it and I don’t suppose I would ever have developed it if I were learning to drive today.

Perhaps it’s an obsolete mental faculty, and a modern brain can free up those resources for something more relevant. Over the course of human history we have developed tools to use our finite mental resources more effectively, but never without a price. Socrates feared that the use of writing would weaken our memory and true understanding. I’m sure he was right, at least about the first part, but it was worth the price. Without writing, nobody today would know what Socrates thought about anything.

But with AI, we’re not enabling ourselves to do more and develop new faculties, because AI seeks to be our universal crutch. Perhaps under other circumstances it could be better, but the entities pushing AI want us to be compliant consumers hypnotised by a endless stream of advertising slop. Fundamentally, they don’t want to help us develop our potential. They want to replace us.