I lived through the computer revolution when computers were still mysterious boxes that occupied entire rooms. I witnessed the arrival of the internet, when the noise of a dial-up modem was the soundtrack of connecting with the world. I dove headfirst into digital business when selling online seemed like sorcery to most companies. In every one of those waves, I saw the same thing happen. A brutal revolution in thinking, in actions, in business, and in society.
I have always been driven by curiosity. My rule was simple and direct: learn everything about what was changing the game. It will be no different now, with Artificial Intelligence.
Looking back, I see how many were left behind. With each new wave, there were always those who preferred the safety of the past. The speeches repeat themselves. People said computers would end thinking. That the internet would isolate people. That e-commerce would destroy brick-and-mortar stores. Now, the refrain is that AI will make us dumber and steal all our jobs.
Is it the same as past revolutions? No. AI is far deeper and advances at a speed we have never experienced. Its role in society follows the same logic of separating those willing to roll up their sleeves and engage with the new context from those who prefer to sit back and look for reasons and conspiracy theories to avoid being part of the revolution.
I admit that what truly keeps me up at night is not the machine. It is the posture of a considerable part of the new generation.
Unlike previous revolutions, where young people were the natural vanguard, I see many of them today in a troubling passivity. They seem not to understand the avalanche passing right over them.
Curiously, along those lines, it is the more seasoned individuals, those who have already taken more hard knocks in life and in the market, who are diving deep and getting the most out of this moment.
What accounts for this? The answer lies in the cognitive capacity to orient, formulate projects, and work alongside these new digital agents. It is a past generation that had to plan in order to build, and build in order to have.
Those of us from the more mature generation were forged in scarcity. We learned early that, to earn the reward, you had to act, dig, build. That is precisely the mindset that AI amplifies. It integrates perfectly with those who know how to act and formulate.
The new generation, however, grew up accustomed to having everything handed to them pre-chewed. Instant consumption, the easy click, the dopamine rush from fifteen-second videos. Everything free and effortless. The problem is that AI, however intelligent it may be, does not perform miracles on its own. It needs direction. It demands that you know what to ask, how to structure a problem, and where you want to go, correcting course and steering toward new options.
Scientific data confirms this field observation. The well-known 2018 Norwegian study that pointed to a drop of three IQ points per decade [1] did not prove we are getting genetically dumber. What American researchers discovered in 2023 is that what is declining is precisely what AI does best. Logical-mathematical reasoning and pattern processing [2].
In other words, the machine has automated factory-floor intelligence.
As MIT specialists and researchers at the University of Barcelona point out, AI stumbles badly on genuine creativity and divergent thinking [3]. In out-of-pattern problem-solving tests, humans still outperform machines. AI generates many ideas, but we generate the original ones [3].
This means our intelligence is not disappearing. It is redistributing. The "positive manifold", the idea that those who are strong in logic are also strong in language, is weakening [4]. We are becoming specialists in a world where the machine handles the heavy, repetitive work.
Here we return to the central point. This redistribution only benefits those who have repertoire. Those who carry the background to connect distant dots. Those who can look at a complex problem and orchestrate AI agents to solve it.
We are moving rapidly toward a society where we will stop being the crowd that consumes and become the masters of billions of autonomous agents. Platforms, traditional programming, data compilation, all of that will become commodity. Natural language will be the only interface.
But the professional future is still very uncertain. What is known is that if this younger generation does not achieve mastery of AI the way the more mature generation is seeking to, the landscape shifts entirely. This means that, while on one hand we may not face a literal social dumbing-down, we will at minimum face greater dependency and a serious lack of creativity in the next generation of professionals.
This could be an involution within a revolution. It will be different from what we experience today in this relationship with AI. But there are those who argue it will produce a population more concerned with being than with doing. More concerned with living than with having. And in that regard AI may even help them, making everyday life easier. But perhaps the human race will be wasting the most remarkable revolution it has ever had. They will use robots and AI just to get a cake recipe or check the daily horoscope. Or perhaps it is my generation that never learned to use machines as it should and always wants to keep control of everything. Who is right? Time will tell. But not in decades. In years, or even less, because what we know for certain is that transformations are moving ever faster and hitting ever harder.
From my perspective, if AI is not steered, we will be the ones being steered. There is no vacuum in this universe.
Article originally published at GazzConecta.
