To judge or not to judge? That's out of the question
At this very moment, someone is probably tearing AI to pieces, for one reason or another: unemployment, a new class of oligopolies, or some reckless approach to safety. Personally, I worry most about losing my own skills without acquiring newer, more valuable ones. As the saying goes, the shirt closest to your body is the dearest - and I suspect the reader shares the same fear.
It’s fascinating to try to predict the one-sentence difference between us and the generations that will grow up in the AI era. What form will their adaptation take? It’s easy to agree that when you delegate a task for long enough, you lose the skill behind it. We forget how to do mental arithmetic once we switch to a calculator, and lose our feel for a paper map once we switch to Google Maps. Never before has a person had this much freedom to delegate such a wide range of tasks - at least in everything digital. Everyone is a manager now. The popular forecast - “we’ll get dumber, look, kids already score worse on exams” - unsettles me, but it seems more likely that we’ll lose something here and gain something there (on average, across the population). Adapting the brain means reusing its resources, so the real question is: who’s first in line to be dropped?
Recently I heard a fascinating fact about memory: earlier generations had far better memories than we do! On second thought it seems obvious, but it still impressed me, and I had to share it - you can find plenty of sources online. Can we extrapolate further? We write less than we used to, and there’s no sign of any new demand to remember more, so our memory is likely to get thoroughly worse, with nowhere to go but down.
So we have a decent candidate for what we’re going to lose; now let’s imagine what we might gain. In the short time I’ve spent watching AI - and its users - I’ve formed a hypothesis about the one skill that makes some people a little better at this. It isn’t quite a skill, actually; it’s more of a character trait. I think it’s the readiness to criticise, paired with confidence in your own abilities: not always deserved, not always realistic, but assertive and bold. Funny, isn’t it? Even funnier is that in 2025 Microsoft published a paper pointing to exactly these two qualities. Meticulousness, a low level of trust, intolerance of mistakes - if you recognised yourself in those words, you’re probably remarkably productive with AI assistants! And, probably, a little less wanted as a boss.
Alongside the worry, another strong feeling won’t leave me. I simply can’t make myself believe in the end of humanity, fallen before rapidly brightening machines. People look to me like nimble cockroaches - new generations adapt beautifully to a new environment and pick up new tools with ease. Darwin, I think, called this our key advantage, the reason we won out over the rest of the monkeys. The brain is plastic; it adapted wonderfully to the internet, and it’s hard to believe it won’t adapt to yet another search improvement. Picture yourself in fifty years, enduring the condescending smirks of your own offspring. Remember the old programmers’ tales of room-sized mainframes? All of that awaits us, tenfold.
Every time I get a result back from an AI, my jaw drops - it’s just astonishing. And at the very same time, I’m obliged to treat it like a piece of crap, even though it knows orders of magnitude more than I do. Everything it does is magnificent, but we mustn’t forget who is critiquing whom.
P.S. Not gonna lie: before publishing this article I did, of course, run it through an AI. The bastard stripped out the insults I’d aimed at it - but I put them right back.