There’s a human, crouched at the entrance to a cave, staring in awe at flashes of lightning. The human doesn’t understand what the flashes are, can’t even begin to comprehend things like electrons or particles. He doesn’t have the logic, the knowledge, to make sense of this powerful force. To him, it springs forth from magic or gods. Perhaps a little of both.

That early human was one of the first thinkers—the countless ancestors who, over vast stretches of time, slowly began to make sense of our world. One thought, one connection, one insight at a time.

From learning to control fire to smelting ore, they figured things out. They learned. They knew.

Now we have started to move in a new direction. A retrograde one. Steadily, often unwittingly, we’ve begun to reverse the process. We don’t want to know things. It’s less work to not know things.

I see it all around me, often in surprising places. The friend whose university professor encourages students to use ChatGPT to write their essay outlines. The capable professionals that have gotten so used to telling Copilot to compose their business emails that they now struggle to do it themselves—and, in fact, don’t want to remember how.

It’s not about the skill of writing. It’s about losing the ability to organize their own thoughts.

Obviously, it’s impossible to know everything or learn every skill. The average person throughout history has known nothing about brain surgery or engineering. And not much more about shoes and ships and sealing-wax, to quote the Walrus.

It’s even more rare to encounter a brilliant, once-in-a-generation thinker. A Leonardo da Vinci or an Einstein. The odds are against it. In fact, I’d wager that at any point in history, the proportion of profound thinkers in any given population has remained roughly the same. 

In any culture and any location, you’d find a scant sliver of a percent of true geniuses within the population at large. A slightly larger percentage of deep thinkers—the inventors and artists with truly original ideas—rested below that. The rest of us have always been lumped somewhere in the vast majority.

Still, it’s long been considered desirable to know how to know. To do the hard, frustrating work of learning, sorting, and repeating in order to make sense of something. Whether it was a Neolithic farmer struggling to make sense of seeds and crops, or a modern fifth-grader working through a math problem, there was value in the process. It was the tool you carried with you and used on other problems you might encounter. In many ways, it was a survival mechanism.

And that’s the process we seem so eager to offload to machines that promise to think for us. They can’t, but we’re so entranced by the illusion that we happily embrace our own cognitive surrender—offloading the very ability to be able to know things.

As I watch this trend gain momentum it feels like we are truly coming full circle, crouching in a world we don’t quite understand and losing our ability to even begin to make sense of things.

Which makes me picture that lone human in a cave, staring at the lightning and pondering the incredible power of the gods and magic. And I can’t help wondering if a child, not yet born into our world of technological ease, will one day become the last thinker.

Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash