Every major technology replaced the dominant tool of the previous era. None of them replaced the human need underneath. Is this time any different?
The car replaced the carriage. Getting from A to B stayed. The computer replaced the typewriter and calculator. Communicating and calculating stayed.
Tool after tool deprecated – the human need underneath, untouched.
But here’s what we forget: walking from A to B was never just transport. It carried a stowaway. It kept us fit. Nobody designed that. It was a side benefit, fused to the core purpose.
The car split them apart. And fitness had to invent its own delivery mechanism – the run, the gym, a spin class. Keeping fit when you don’t need to became a hobby, then a status symbol. Eventually an identity.
Writing carries a stowaway too: thinking.
Structuring an argument. Finding the right word. Pushing an idea hard enough to test it. That was never separate from writing the report – it came fused in. Generative AI is splitting them apart right now, at a scale no previous technology touched.
And this split is harder to see than the last one.
“The person who’s stopped structuring their own arguments doesn’t feel out of breath. They feel efficient.”
The gym arrived decades after the car. A lot of bodies suffered in between – and nobody noticed day by day. That’s how this decline works. It never announces itself. We can’t even name what the cost will look like yet. Neither could they.
Thinking will need its own gym. Intentional. Slightly inconvenient on purpose.
This post is an example. I could have asked AI to write it. Instead I fired up my AI interviewer and had it question me for an hour. Then we refined the draft together. Much slower than ghostwriting – but inordinately richer.
Not everyone will lean into intentional thinking. But a minority will – in the same way a minority chose fitness. And others joined, until it became a movement, a lifestyle, an identity.
Deliberate thinking may become exactly what fitness became. Maybe even the next status symbol.
People have no obligation to be fit. People have no obligation to be smart. But their lives are shaped by both.