Kevin SuraceKevin Surace is an AI pioneer, inventor, author, and human effectiveness authority helping people thrive while AI reshapes work and life.

AI Is Not Making You Dumb

14 May 2026 · 1 min

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1:17

In this brief conversational clip, Kevin Surace challenges the notion that AI is making people less intelligent. He argues that routine cognitive tasks—like performing long division mentally—have been offloaded to machines because they can do them faster and more accurately, and that reclaiming such tasks offers no added value. Instead, Surace suggests using AI to augment higher‑order strategic thinking: feeding complex spreadsheets into AI to surface the biggest business impacts, identify role mismatches, and generate actionable insights. He warns that if AI is used merely as a crutch for low‑level analysis, it can erode critical thinking skills, but when leveraged to produce and analyze large volumes of strategic content, it can sharpen the mind and amplify decision‑making.

Chapters

Everyone says AI is making us dumber, but this expert just exposed what they're missing.
When is the last time you did complex long division in your head? Most of humanity has lost the ability to do long division because a machine does it. You cannot add value to your company or your life by doing long division in your head. You could fine-tune some interesting part of the brain that can do long division, but no one wants your outcome at all because there's a machine that does it in a second. Like, I will get a spreadsheet, has a ton of tabs on it. I go, I add no value in trying to evaluate the strategy of the outcome of the spreadsheet, right? The strategic outcome of that spreadsheet. So instead, what I want to do is feed that to AI, let AI tell me what are the 10 biggest impacts on my business, or what is this spreadsheet telling me? And then I can say, huh, how do I go forward with this? How can I change my business? Do I have the wrong person in the wrong role? There's all kinds of things that come out of this, and I added no value to thinking there and trying to find through the numbers and charts. And so it's all how you use AI, and if you use it wrong as a crutch, it's a total crutch, you will lose the ability to critically think. If you use it to develop 10 times more content output analysis than you've ever had, and then you're reading all that and you're analyzing it, you sharpen your mind.