Is AI Making Us Less Intelligent?

December 19, 2025 — by Per Christensson

Artificial intelligence makes our lives easier by summarizing documents, improving our writing, generating images, and writing source code. But are we depending on these tools so much that they are making us less intelligent?

The concern of technology's impact on human intelligence is not new. Society has undergone several technological shifts over the past century, and humans have become more productive and knowledgeable as a result. Let me share two examples.

Calculators

When digital calculators became mainstream, teachers worried their students would rely on them so much that they wouldn't learn basic math. After all, who needs to remember how to add or subtract when a device can do it for you? But decades later, children still learn basic math skills and memorize multiplication tables in elementary school. Most high schoolers can tell you that 5 x 7 is 35 and 8 x 8 is 64 — without a calculator.

We still teach students long division and multiplication, even though they will most likely use calculators in real-life situations. (When was the last time you tried to solve an equation like 865,317 ÷ 12 by hand?) The "how" is still important to know, even if a digital device can produce the result more quickly than a human.

As long as we continue to teach children how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, calculators don’t negatively impact their math skills. If anything, they help accelerate learning by providing each student with a quick way to check their own calculations.

Autocorrect

Early word processors provided a "spell check" feature that checked documents for spelling errors. Some of us are old enough to remember the "Check spelling" command, which launched the painstaking process of accepting or ignoring dozens of corrections based on the software's built-in dictionary. Modern operating systems make this process much easier by checking our spelling as we type, and autocorrecting mistakes in real-time.

When software automatically corrects your spelling errors, does it make you a worse speller? From my experience, it does quite the opposite. When I don’t know how to spell a word, I type it out as closely as I can, and autocorrect fixes it for me. The tool actually teaches me the spelling of a word I might not have taken the time to look up otherwise.

The same holds true for grammar. Modern word processors correct our grammar and spelling mistakes, improving our writing skills. Since I started using Grammarly a few years ago, I've learned how to use commas and hyphens more appropriately, using grammatical guidelines I wasn’t taught in school.

Increasing Learning or Laziness?

In the same way we learn from calculators and autocorrect, we can learn from AI. By observing the ways artificial intelligence improves our writing, we can become better writers. By asking more questions, we can increase our knowledge. By requesting new ideas, we can become more creative. AI can accelerate your learning and productivity.

HOWEVER... If you are a lazy person who prefers to take shortcuts to finish a task, AI has the potential to make you lazier. If you don’t care how things work, AI will help you avoid learning new things. If you prefer to copy others’ work instead of creating your own, AI will make it even easier.

The Summary

(In case you haven't summarized this article using AI)

I think most people are curious, creative, and hard-working. On aggregate, I believe artificial intelligence will increase our intelligence, rather than make us dumber. But we must teach the next generation the importance of learning new things, working hard, and using our God-given creativity. For those of us who have already completed our education, it's essential that we use AI as a coach, rather than a crutch.

No one can predict precisely how much AI will impact our lives in the next five years. It’s hard to even imagine what life will be like ten years from now. We’ll probably be surprised by how much it has changed the way we work and study. Regardless of the impact, I believe the most intelligent people will use AI to augment their work rather than rely on it.