AI doesn’t Win by Speed or Smarts – We Lose by our Own Weakness

Losing human ground

A few days ago, I was walking through the supermarket. In front of me there was a boy of about nine years old, glued to the screen of a smartphone. He was not really walking, he was drifting – like a kind of zombie between the aisles: body here, attention somewhere else.

At one point he leaned halfway over my shopping cart to see what "his mother had bought." Only… it was my cart, his mother was somewhere else in the store.

"Hey little man, what can I do for you?" I asked.

He looked at me for a brief moment, said nothing, and then dropped back into his screen. As if I was not there at all.

Not because he is naughty, but because he has never really learned how to look another human being in the eye and say "sorry" or "good afternoon." He is not an exception. A whole generation now walks through the streets and the shops like this, sits like this at the dinner table, moves like this through their days. Physically present, but no longer truly here. That little boy is our future. 

The supermarket zombie generation

Spend an afternoon just watching:

• Children at a restaurant table, each with their own screen.
• Teenagers in the city, walking side by side, but each in their own digital bubble.
• Young people on the train: headphones on, phone in hand, doing their best to avoid eye contact.

Social contact has started to look almost optional. The simple words – good morning, good afternoon, enjoy your meal – are disappearing from daily use. Not because these are bad kids, but because their parents no longer really teach them social skills, and almost nobody lets them truly practise life face to face. The screen quietly slides in between them and the world, every single time.

Social intelligence is not theory, it is a set of muscles. You develop it through hundreds of tiny moments: meeting someone’s eyes, asking a question, clearing up a misunderstanding, saying sorry, feeling a boundary. When a generation trades those moments for swiping and scrolling, those muscles weaken without anyone really noticing.

How we outsource our own intelligence

I got my first mobile phone when I was forty. Before that, I could recall around thirty phone numbers from memory – not just my parents’, but friends, family, colleagues. If you had woken me up in the middle of the night, I could have recited them with names attached.

Now I sometimes struggle to remember my own number.

It is not that my brain suddenly became worse. I simply do not need to use those numbers anymore. My phone carries the memory for me – and slowly my own memory shrinks along with it.

It is the same story with navigation. Years ago, we drove everywhere with a map in the car or simply by paying attention, reading road signs and staying in touch with our surroundings. After driving a route once or twice, it was stored in your mind.

Today, I can hardly get anywhere without a route planner. The voice of the navigation system has taken over my internal map. I no longer need to remember where I am; I only need to follow instructions.

If this already happens to someone who only started using a mobile phone at forty, what happens to children who have been outsourcing everything to a screen since they were four?

AI: a giant memory, not a human mind

And then AI enters the picture.

We love to call it artificial intelligence, but at its core it is something else: a gigantic, incredibly fast memory. It searches, combines, recognises patterns, predicts the next word. It mixes what already exists, in endless variations and styles.

What it does not have is a soul, a conscience, a gut feeling, a moral compass. It does not feel shame, love or courage. It simply does what it is built to do: process, repeat, optimise.

That is where the paradox lies:

• On one side, a system that can remember and repackage almost everything.
• On the other side, a generation that barely learns to feel, to remember, to connect and to create.

AI does not “win” because it is so smart. It starts to dominate when we become so lazy and so empty that we hand over our thinking, our feeling and our choosing without asking any real questions.

A generation without memory and creativity

What worries me is not that AI appears everywhere. What worries me is that a generation is growing up that hardly develops its own intelligence, builds very little personal memory and barely trains its creativity at all.

• If you never have to remember phone numbers, your memory is not being trained.
• If you never drive without navigation, you stop building an inner map of the world.
• If you never play without screens, you do not develop fantasy and your own stories.
• If you let AI write every text, idea and plan, you stop sharpening your own thinking.

These kids will soon be able to let AI produce anything: school papers, application letters, marketing plans, strategies. But if there are no real humans left who can imagine something genuinely new, the human source behind AI will slowly dry up. We end up with a world full of executors and fewer and fewer real originators.

AI does not win, we surrender

AI does not win because of speed or clever tricks. It starts to win because we quietly dismantle our own human intelligence:

• Less empathy, because we rarely meet each other fully present.
• Weaker memory, because devices remember everything for us.
• Less creativity, because we hardly ever allow boredom, play and experimentation.
• Less courage, because we prefer to follow instructions instead of making our own choices.

We stop being co-creators and become human extension cords, carrying out whatever the system suggests. AI becomes the driver, and we sit in the passenger seat.

Not because it has to be that way, but because we have unlearned how to sit behind the wheel ourselves.

What this generation really needs

The solution is not to throw all technology away or to ban every screen. The solution is to dare to become human again: with memory, creativity, social awkwardness and real presence.

That starts with small, concrete choices:

• When a child bumps into your cart in the supermarket, take a moment to really see them and help them practise looking you in the eye and saying “sorry”.
• Have meals at the table without phones, even if it feels restless and uncomfortable at first.
• Choose days or moments without navigation: find your own way, get lost, turn around, remember the route.
• Use AI as a tool, not as a replacement: think with it, question it, push back, instead of blindly copying whatever it produces.

AI is, at its core, a fast, giant memory. It is our addiction to comfort and outsourcing that makes us let ourselves be defeated.

The question is not “How dangerous is AI really?” The deeper question is: “How strong are we willing to make our own human intelligence, creativity and presence again?”

Maybe that starts with the next kid you meet in the supermarket. Look them in the eye. Say something. Let them feel that there are still real human beings walking around in this world.