The Catalyst is a long-form video and audio podcast exploring identity and belonging, culture, belief systems, power, and change in a rapidly transforming world.
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The Future We Didn't Choose (Part 2: The Slow Surrender)
•IgnitePoint Studio•Episode 6
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As AI takes on more of our thinking, writing, and remembering, are we gaining efficiency at the cost of something deeper? A short reflection on convenience, capability, and what it means to stay human in the age of AI.
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SPEAKER_00
There are moments when a culture reaches a quiet breaking point, not loud, not dramatic, just the slow realization that something isn't working anymore. The catalyst exists for those moments. This is a space where we question what we inherited as a mind who we are becoming and explore what it means to evolve without losing ourselves. I am a fani one on a go. Welcome to the catalyst. When did we stop thinking for ourselves? The most dangerous thing about AI is not that it can write essays for you or perform a tedious task you don't want to sit with, but it's how easy it makes everything feel. Because human beings have always chased convenience. We want things that are easy, fast, and instantaneous. Let me give you an example to truly understand what I'm trying to describe. Imagine this a student sits down to write an essay. They are not bad students and not a lazy student either. Just picture a regular student like everyone else. So they open their laptop, they have the ideas, but the ideas are not fully developed. The ideas will take time to develop. So the student would need to think through it and figure out the points he wants to use in his essay. So instead of doing all of that, they ask AI, help me structure this, give me a better version of this, make it sound uh smarter, and within seconds, they get an answer from AI with a very polished essay that is clear and impressive. Something they would not have been able to produce by themselves, at least not without effort and not without sitting through the painstaking process. So they have this wonderful essay that AI has written, right? Ready to be handed in, and they submit it. And guess what? They get a good grade and move on. Now, did you notice anything wrong in that process? Because there is something that is supposed to happen in that process that did not happen. That is, they didn't struggle through the idea. They've not done any mental exercise. They didn't wrestle with confusion trying to figure out a concept. They didn't sit long enough to understand the topic deeply, enough to have the light bulb moment or an aha moment. They rob themselves of the most important part of that process. And that is where the real shift is happening. Because thinking is more than just getting answers, but more about what happens to you in between the process while trying to figure answers out. That feeling of finally figuring something out, it does something important in the human psyche. But we need to understand that what I described now is what builds patience, it's what sharpens human reasoning and forces clarity. But if something else does that for you, what exactly are you developing? And what exactly have you done? Now, let's look at it from this angle. When the student becomes a professional, meaning deadline increases, expectations grow, and AI is still there, probably faster. So, what do you think they are going to do? Of course, they will use AI again to write, to analyze, to think through problems, and it's not even because they can't do it themselves, but because they don't have to anymore, and over time, that decision repeats quietly, softly. This is how cognitive erosions happen through lack of use, because what you don't use becomes dormant. So, for clarity, I am not saying we are going to lose our cognitive ability. No, you don't lose your cognitive ability, you don't lose your ability to think, but you can lose your relationship with thinking. The reason is because the less you struggle to think, the less you learn how to think. Now, let's take a peep into the future. Let's look at what happens when a generation grows up like this. When a generation becomes heavy users of AI and never needing to sit with a concept or ideas to think through it deeply, never needing to walk through complex ideas, never needing to finish their own thoughts without external assistance, they are not going to feel less intelligence, yeah, but what will happen is that they will feel they are being more efficient than older generations, but underneath that feeling something very important is missing, and that is the ability to think deeply, question independently, and form ideas from scratch. Because fluency does not equal depth, we are seeing the science already today. We now see people who use professional jargons and sound fluent and eloquent, but when you listen carefully and ask them deeper questions, they fumble. So let me ask you a question. If AI is just a tool that helps us get something done, like most people will say, the question now is at what point does that help that we get from AI become a replacement? And is it when AI improves your thinking or when it becomes your first step instead of your last resort? Because that's where the line is, that's where we should draw the line. We are not going to lose our intelligence, right? We are not going to, we're not saying that we're going to lose our intelligence, but we are going to lose our relationship with our intelligence. Two different things entirely. And maybe, just maybe, the deeper issue is even we are moving toward a world where thinking will become optional, where we no longer just think naturally, but having to choose between whether we're going to use AI to get something done faster or whether we are going to use our own thinking ability to get a task done. So the question is not what can AI do for us. The question is what are we slowly choosing not to do anymore? Because the moment you no longer need to think is the moment you might stop learning how to think. Talk about it. This is how change begins. This is the catalyst.
