AI is inescapable and the danger is to make us incapable simply through ease of use
Tools, Crutches, and Leverage Multipliers:
Tools -- Help you do something better, faster, and reduce cost. Proper tool use requires proficiency and depth of understanding and typically growth...
Crutch -- Inability to perform, explain, and do without the tool renders the tool a crutch. Note that care must be taken when one simply cannot perform and activity except in the context of the tool. Once inside the context can you function using it as a tool or does it do the work as you observe?
We all suffer from tool based automation reducing us to observer. The presence of a tool before developing depth becomes a barrier to achieving that depth. The easier it is to use the tool, the less likely depth and understanding develop. Curious people will dig in, most will not, and yet there is a depth created with the tool itself, a meta depth, which can create advances beyond!
Leverage -- Since tools reduce time and have a nature of their own, the proficiency in the tool is likely as important as the underlying aspect it is replacing. If a user has good depth before the tool and trains to understand the tool, you move from tool to leveraged multiplier. Failure to understand the depth before the tool makes it initially a crutch. Good depth and low tool understanding renders simply a tool...
Questions to ask:
Can you do math without the calculator?
Do you try to figure things out before letting the tool do it
Do you switch between you doing it and the tool to validate both your understanding and the tools result?
Can you leverage the tool to do things beyond your physical limits, but not your depth of understanding
Did you learn something through using the tool?
Or, do you let the tool work for you and hope the result is correct...
AI, smart phones, internet search, graphing calculators, spell check, etc... are Tools, very powerful tools.
They become a crutch when ease of use diminishes the perceived need know, leading to not knowing. We cannot be wise if we do not know, and not knowing means we do not understand the information that the data contains...