AI 并非起点：我们早已把部分自我外包给智能手机

People worry that we're becoming too dependent on AI.

It writes for us.

Searches for us.

Helps us code.

And increasingly, we ask it what we should do next.

I understand the concern.

I think about it too.

But recently I started wondering:

Did this really begin with AI?

The more I thought about it, the less it seemed that way.

We've been outsourcing small parts of ourselves to technology for a long time.

AI is just making it much easier to notice.

I used to memorize phone numbers

When I was younger, I knew several phone numbers by memory.

Family.

Friends.

Sometimes even friends' home numbers.

You needed to know the number if you wanted to call someone.

I barely do that anymore.

I search for a name and tap it.

The phone remembers for me.

And honestly, this doesn't feel like a loss most of the time.

It's convenient.

There is very little reason for me to store dozens of phone numbers in my head when a device can do it better.

So I stopped.

Not because someone forced me to.

Because the technology made remembering unnecessary.

I stopped memorizing routes too

Something similar happened with navigation.

If I visited the same place often enough, I used to remember the route.

Which station.

Which street.

Which building meant I needed to turn.

Today, I can visit somewhere completely unfamiliar without thinking much about it.

I open a map.

If I take the wrong turn, it recalculates.

If traffic changes, it finds another route.

Again, this is better in almost every practical way.

I don't want to go back.

But there is a difference between:

I know how to get there.

and:

My phone knows how to get there.

I notice that difference whenever my battery gets low in an unfamiliar place.

Discovery changed too

Restaurants are another example.

There was a time when finding a place meant remembering somewhere you'd visited, hearing about it from someone, or just walking past it.

Now I usually search first.

Ratings.

Reviews.

Photos.

Maps.

Social media.

Recommendation algorithms.

The chance of making a bad choice goes down.

But something else goes down too:

the number of times I discover something without already knowing that other people liked it.

Technology didn't remove choice.

It changed how I arrive at the choice.

Then AI arrived

Contacts remember phone numbers.

GPS remembers routes.

Search engines retrieve information.

Recommendation systems decide what might be worth our attention.

Now generative AI is moving into a slightly different layer.

It doesn't just remember or retrieve.

It participates in the process of thinking.

How should I structure this?

What am I missing?

How could I implement this?

What are the alternatives?

That might be why AI feels different.

Previous tools outsourced pieces of memory and navigation.

AI can outsource pieces of reasoning.

I'm not arguing that we should stop using it

I use AI constantly.

I use it while developing.

I use it to explore ideas.

I use it to find gaps in my own thinking.

I use it when writing.

I'm not interested in pretending that avoiding useful tools somehow makes the work more authentic.

I don't carry a paper map just to prove I can navigate without GPS.

But I do think there is a useful question hidden underneath all of this:

What do I still want to keep as mine?

I don't care that I can't remember everyone's phone number.

I don't care that Google Maps remembers streets better than I do.

But I do care whether I can explain why I made a decision.

I care whether I understand the code I'm shipping.

I care whether an opinion is actually mine or something I accepted because a system gave me a convincing answer.

Convenience has always had a trade

Smartphones didn't suddenly make us incapable.

They made certain abilities less necessary.

And when an ability becomes unnecessary often enough, we naturally practice it less.

AI may be another step in the same direction.

Only this time the thing becoming less necessary might not be remembering a number or memorizing a route.

It might be parts of the thinking process itself.

That doesn't automatically make AI bad.

But it does make the boundary worth noticing.

Technology rarely arrives and says:

Give me this part of yourself.

It gives us something useful.

Something convenient.

Something we quickly stop wanting to live without.

And little by little, we decide what we no longer need to do ourselves.

So when people ask whether AI is making us too dependent on technology, I'm starting to think the answer didn't begin with ChatGPT.

AI wasn't the beginning.

We've been making this trade for a long time.