AI will never be a shortcut to wisdom
By Jeff DeGraff | Published: 2025-09-10 13:00:00 | Source: Business – Big Think
Subscribe to the Big Think Business newsletter
Learn from the world’s greatest business thinkers.
Once upon a time – not long ago – the Internet was open like a library with no closing hours. Google, and then Wikipedia, gave us a strange kind of magic: everything we wanted to know, there, flashing before us. It was harmless enough, liberating even. We no longer have to argue about who directed Casablanca Or the difference between a quark and a lepton. The answers flowed like tap water.
But something happened in this flood. We started to confuse the map with the terrain.
It wasn’t long before the acronyms came – CliffsNotes for Shakespeare, then for Kant, then for life itself. Everything abstract or difficult is sculpted into quick summaries, powerful headlines, and 30-second reels. Learning has become a collection of “life hacks,” each of which promises to make you smarter, faster, richer, or more “improved.” We begin to slice reality, assuming that each part bears the same shimmering reflection as the whole. It was as if a single puzzle piece, held aloft and scrutinized, could reveal the whole picture.
Try Big Think+ for your business
Engaging content about important skills, taught by global experts.
But ask anyone actually He knows Something – really knows it. A scientist who spent decades in a laboratory, an artist with dye on his hands, and a leader who has failed to advance more times than he can count. They will tell you: The truth out of context is just a piece of glass. It cuts. Shine. But it doesn’t build a window. That’s why we ask spelling bee contestants to “use the word in a sentence.” It’s not about rote memorization. It’s about anchoring meaning in context – knowing when, why and how something matters.
Then came artificial intelligence.
At first, it was amazing. You’ve finished your sentence, cleaned up your prose, Do your homework. Answers became longer, smoother and more convincing. It stopped being a search engine and became an oracle. Velvety sound in your ear. Expert on call.
But there’s a problem with all this knowledge. Nothing happened. Nothing is practiced. It’s just He is. And anything that is immediately known—such as the answer to a Trivial Pursuit card—has no real value. It is not applied. It’s not integrated. It’s just data, sitting in a little sterile bubble, whispering its useless perfection.
Now, I’ll admit I’m a bit prone to this oldtimeritus. After nearly forty years of teaching graduate students and advising some of the most innovative companies on the planet, I’ve earned the right to sigh a little. But it’s not about “kids these days.” In fact, it’s not about youth at all. The transformation I am witnessing—this collapse in intellectual agility—astonishes all generations. All cultures. All walks of life.
Studies of cognitive flexibility, along with anecdotal observations about the death of long-form journalism and the slow drift of readers’ attention, suggest something terrible: We have become unable to sit still in the shadow of ambiguity. We no longer walk through the fog of a complex question, but rather jump through it like stones. Our thoughts are racing, but the world is a marathon. Thus, we are left with answers to the wrong questions.
The answer is simple only if you don’t understand the question. This is the danger of living in a world where thinking is outsourced. Where perception becomes project management.
What happens when we can no longer think through contradiction, paradox and tension? When climate change, displacement, political division, and regional conflicts are seen as discrete problems with easy answers – when in fact they are complex systems that resist simplicity?
The answer is simple only if you don’t understand the question.
This is the danger of living in a world where thinking is outsourced. Where perception becomes project management. Where uncertainty is eliminated, not explored. Where the truth is canned and placed on the shelves, and you do not struggle with it. If the world is a box of nails—individual truths, sharp and ready—then our minds become hammers. Tools of power and certainty. Banging conclusions. Flatten the nuance. Who builds a cathedral with a hammer? Who writes a symphony with a hammer?
This is no way to live. Because if you see the world as nails, you will confuse hype with knowledge. You will assume that size means validity. And when you don’t know how to recognize true experience — because you haven’t acquired any yourself — you will fall in love with the confident fool. Doctor YouTube. Instagram monk. LinkedIn philosopher.
They’ll tell you there’s a miracle diet, a shortcut to riches, and a way to find your calling before breakfast. They will sell you the answers already packaged and labeled. But do not confuse the packaging with the product. Machines don’t have your answers. Not the real thing. And not perfect ones. Because true understanding does not come from the outputs, but from them He practices. Of doing the work. Of trying, failing, adapting and trying again. Create your own map.
This does not mean that artificial intelligence does not have a place. I use it. I respect that. maybe Elaborate intelligence. But it is not possible replace wisdom. And wisdom is formed in contact—in living, in suffering, in waiting, in seeing how one thing fits into another, and another, until the world begins to reveal not only what it is, but what it is. means.
If you want to reclaim your sanity – not as a hammer, but as a compass, or a loom, or a garden – start here:
- Ask better questions.
- Be in doubt of certainty.
- Practice long-term attention.
- Sit with something confusing until it teaches you something.
We are not supposed to be a hammer in a world of nails. We were created to wonder, to wander, to build. The true mind does not pulse, but rather inquires, communicates, and reshapes. He listens to the contradiction without collapsing. He’s playing. Most of all, she remembers that the world was never simple. It has been flattened by search engines for a while.
So, take it back. Create your own sentence. Put the truth in its place. And live in the question.
Subscribe to the Big Think Business newsletter
Learn from the world’s greatest business thinkers.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
