Here's a question for you to consider: If we become fully reliant on AI, what happens if it’s suddenly taken away?

It’s easy to brush this off as theoretical, but sit with it for a minute. Think about your phone. For most of us, it’s so fully integrated into daily life that losing it would feel catastrophic. Navigation, scheduling, payments, communication—all of it would be gone at once. We could still navigate the world, but it would be one frustration after another. However, as frustrating and disruptive as that would be, it wouldn’t be impossible to recover from. We’d complain. We’d slow down. But eventually we’d adapt.

And that, I think, is an important distinction to make here, because when the question involves AI, it becomes an altogether unprecedented thought experiment.

Once we experience AI in all its power, when neural networks are trained on truly massive amounts of compute, will we ever be able to live without it again?

That, I believe, is the question of the moment, the one we should all be grappling with.

A Real Conundrum

Imagine a widescale disruption—say a computer virus or a manufacturing crisis—that renders every form of motorized transportation obsolete. No cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, scooters, trains, planes, or boats. Overnight, the entire world grinds to a halt.

The disruption would be massive. Supply chains would fracture. Mobility would collapse. Daily life would be upended. Yet all would not be lost. We could still walk. Intercontinental travel would vanish, but locally we’d still move, slowly and painfully, from one place to another.

That fallback option doesn’t exist when it comes to AI. The stakes are higher when what we outsource isn’t transportation but cognition itself.

A 2012 Science Direct paper put it simply: “new neurons are kept alive by effortful learning, a process that involves concentration in the present moment of experience over some extended period of time.” In other words: use it or lose it.

So what happens if I outsource enough thinking—critical reasoning, math, writing, even reading—that the mental muscles go soft? What happens if the technology disappears and I no longer know how to function without it?

And more unsettling: what if I never learned those skills in the first place because I never needed to?

How do I go back to who I was before?

And what if I never learned it all in the first place because I simply didn’t need to?

Real Intelligence

To think, to cognize—that’s at least, in part, what it means to be human.

If all our problems indeed go away because they can now be solved by a computer, then how do we progress as a society? So much of our identity as human beings is tied up in our ability to think and work that if we no longer have to think and work, what’s left?

We know how to walk because we’ve done it before. We know how to live without our phones because we’ve done it before.

But what happens to the next generation, the generation of children who learn, from the very beginning of their lives, to use AI for everything, the generation of children who don’t see working and thinking as fundamental to their nature because they simply don’t have to do it—or don’t have to do it to the extent that we did?

Who do they become if AI is then taken away?

What self do they return to if no previous self exists?

It’s easy to dismiss these sorts of questions as implausible or alarmist, and I admit that they’re certainly theoretical, but it’s the cognitive function of parsing the theoretical, of trying to understand what’s going on right now and what the consequences might be—in both business and society at large— that each and every one of us should be thinking about.

There’s no doubt that AI is going make a seismic shift in every part of our lives over the next decade.

What I’m trying to understand is whether it’s possible to wield the power of AI without becoming completely subsumed by it.

Holding on to What Makes Us Human

It feels to me like the key is to hold on to our humanity as long as possible, to understand that in the “human + machine” equation, both sides aren’t—or shouldn’t be— weighted equally. The human has to be the priority, lest we lose ourselves completely for the sake of advancement and innovation.

Even amidst the excitement and possibility of this moment, we need to remember who we were before all this, who, until very recently, we thought we would always be.

We need to remember that we are human beings who can think and work and read and write and learn—so that even if we don’t have to think and work and read and write and learn anymore, we can still become those human beings again should we need to. It's also important to understand that before artificial intelligence there was, simply, intelligence—the real stuff—and it was that intelligence that made us who we are. We observed and hypothesized about and grappled with the problems of our lives and we used what we learned to chart a new course, to avoid the paths that delivered us to those problems in the first place, so we could arrive and grapple with newer, bigger problems.

Which is maybe how we arrived here.

We’ve been solving the problems of our lives so earnestly that we’re now on the cusp of solving a great deal of them at once, and I’m not sure we know exactly what to do with that.

We’ve come full circle only to realize the circle is actually a spiral.

Which brings me all the way back to the beginning: Assuming we become reliant on AI, what would happen if it was suddenly taken away?

The answer, I suspect, is that it would different for each and every one of us.

But we’d all do well to remember that indexing heavily on critical thinking, on learning the way we always have while simultaneously celebrating and experimenting with AI is probably the right path forward.

Because when the coming technological wave, this tsunami of artificial intelligence, finally crashes on the beaches of our lives, we’ll still need to discern which direction to run.