Will AI Make Us Stupid?

A surge of lazy thinking. This is one of the Top 10 Trends for 2026 according to Gartner: “As automation accelerates, the ability to think independently and creatively will become both increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.”

What Gartner is referring to is the assumption that the more human workers rely on AI, the less effort they put into thinking for themselves. After all, why waste any brain cells if the AI can do the work for us, right? And just like any muscle that is not exercised, a lack of thinking will lead to atrophy.

First, the term lazy thinking may be an unfortunate choice of words because it implies laziness when the issue is really a lack of practice. Lazy thinking would simply lead to the loss of a skill that is no longer needed or used. That kind of cause and effect is not new. Most technological advancements in history have made certain procedural skills (and yes, jobs) disappear.

For example, navigators used to determine their position for centuries by using the stars and, later, by using a sextant to read solar altitude. This was a difficult skill that every vessel and jetliner relied on. But in the 1980s, technologies like INS, VOR, DME, LORAN, and eventually GPS made that skill obsolete. There are no navigators anymore outside of sailboat racing and some military applications. Today, GPS has become so ubiquitous that everyone can navigate. Yet, Gen Z doesn’t know how to read a map. That is the impact of technology making a once-critical skill unnecessary.

We often debate why our children are still being tested on skills like multiplication or spelling. After all, we all carry a calculator in our pockets, and every time we type, there is a spell-checker. Educational institutions have struggled with this question for years.

But here is the rub. Learning how mathematical calculations work builds a deeper understanding of the rules and interdependencies behind them. This understanding increases your intelligence because it strengthens your ability to think critically and solve problems. Note that I don’t subscribe to the idea that intelligence is something you are born with and can’t change. Some people have a natural predisposition toward these concepts, while others have to work harder to build them. Either way, higher-level mathematical thinking or the application of math to describe our physical world (physics) is impossible without developing this part of our cognitive abilities.

This leads to a second interpretation of lazy thinking, one that suggests AI will make us less intelligent. In other words, AI will make us stupid.

Artificial intelligence is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. As we delegate those tasks to AI, will our capabilities to perform these tasks atrophy?

Well, they could.

We already see an early version of this challenge in the business world, where data-driven decision-making has become a mantra. Leaders at every level are expected to back up decisions with data. Of course, if you have good data, you would be foolish not to use it. That kind of decision-making is easy. But what happens when there is no data or when the data quality is poor? Leaders still have to make decisions. That is why they are sometimes called decision-makers.

Their job is to take the existing data and leverage their experience, instinct, and intellect to make the right call. Organizations that rely too heavily on data become paralyzed when good data is not available. Their leaders become unable to make decisions without complete and accurate visibility. They delay their decisions, asking (or hoping) for more data. Their decision-making ability has atrophied, and their organizations lose velocity. (I wrote about this in Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted).

AI could lead to the same type of atrophy on another level and across a broader spectrum of tasks.

Like every other technology, AI will certainly displace some skills, including spelling, writing, summarization, reading comprehension, pattern recognition, data analysis, and more. But it is still unclear to what degree AI will be able to assess, reason, decide, and problem-solve, which are the hallmarks of intelligence. There will certainly be many useful AI tools that assist humans with these cognitive tasks, but will AI take over these tasks entirely? Maybe.

If that happens, and if humans outsource too much thinking to AI, our cognitive capabilities as we know them today may become obsolete. And maybe that will make those who still possess such capabilities more valuable, just like Gartner predicts. (Yes, I’m agreeing with Gartner on this one.)

The 2006 movie Idiocracy is a fun sci-fi comedy that imagines a world where humanity’s collective intelligence drops dramatically after 500 years. In the movie, the cause is not AI but the differential reproduction rates of people with certain traits. … You should watch it if you have not seen it; it is quite entertaining.

Are we destined for an Idiocracy-like future? Hopefully not. Still, AI is shaping up to be one of those technologies that will have a major impact on humanity.