Issue 98: A Bulletin for Big Ideas and Better Business

OPINION / AI

The purpose of AI is to amplify us. Not weaken our critical thinking or the strength of our workforce.

💬 Sol Rashidi

Sol Rashidi is author of Your AI Survival Guide: Scraped Knees, Bruised Elbows and Lessons Learned from Real-World AI Deployments.She is the world’s first chief AI officer for enterprise, has 10 patents, and helped IBM launch Watson, its supercomputer, back in 2011.

Have you noticed cognitive decline lately? You find it impossible to navigate to a new location without a smartphone, and worse, you can’t retrace your directions because you’ve all but outsourced your memory and recollection to a GPS app. Or you step into a rental car and find it nearly impossible to parallel park without relying on all the fancy tech features like cameras in the front and back bumpers.

Perhaps you spend all day on email and Slack, then in the evening discover your in-person conversation skills aren’t up to their usual standard. You feel numb. The cost of outsourcing our human abilities to technology has become greater as devices have advanced and proliferated. And with the acceleration of AI, we’re about to notice it a whole lot more.

Some people claim that tech is simply taking care of the low-level stuff – the menial things that humans are too intelligent to worry about. AI is a supercharger of our abilities because it has the capacity to handle tasks that we view as ‘mundane’. Outsourcing jobs of a low cognitive load enables us to create space for more intellectually challenging ones. But I think we may be taking this to an extreme.

Why? Because some of our ‘mundane’ and repetitive work is actually what gives us a competitive edge, and keeps our judgement sharp and discernment on alert. For example, professional athletes use tools and tech to optimise their performance, but they never outsource their drills – because some tasks are meant to be done in order to preserve things like our common sense, reflexes, and attention.

Professional athletes use tools and tech to optimise their performance, but they never outsource their drills

It pays to keep these capabilities in good health, but instead I see we are starting to outsource way too much and paying the price of critical thinking, focus, memory, and recollection.

When we relinquish the journey of thinking, we are in danger of creating a scenario of what I call ‘intellectual atrophy’. Our brains are a muscle, and if not used, they will atrophy – and so will our capacity to focus, to analyse, and to discern. This worrying situation will be propelled by our need for convenience. Business rewards pace and profusion, quickness over quality, speed over substance – we are looking for shortcuts everywhere, and all in search of ‘more’.

We are in danger of creating a scenario of what I call ‘intellectual atrophy’

The response from business leaders? Reconsider what AI should be used for. Are you introducing these new tools for (i) replacement and displacement, or (ii) for human flourishing and workforce strengthening? Your responsibility as a leader is to strengthen your workforce, not diminish it. This means encouraging them to choose comprehension over convenience, quality over quickness, and substance over speed.

Choose comprehension over convenience, quality over quickness, and substance over speed

Endeavours such as the Human Amplification Index (HAI) are in place to do just that – quantitatively measure the strength of your workforce before and after AI and automation to ensure you’re amplifying your greatest asset, human capital, and not diminishing it.

The end goal is to elevate what we do, whether that’s around ingenuity, creativity, or critical thinking –  and not to fall into the trap of using these capabilities as a dependency or a crutch. The decline is not inevitable.

The decline is not inevitable

We asked Sol a couple of questions on how she personally relates to creativity, here’s what she had to say…

TBOC: What is your creative North Star?

SR: My creative North Star is simple: to make the complex human again. I design frameworks, languages, and systems – like the Human Amplification Index – that remind us that technology was never meant to replace us, but to amplify us. My work is anchored in a single belief: AI should amplify human ingenuity, not erode it.

That means my creativity is always pointed toward one outcome:  turning complexity into clarity so people can think more, create more, and matter more!

TBOC: What has inspired you lately?

SR: Lately, I’ve been deeply inspired by a pattern I’m seeing across industries – using AI and outsourcing our thinking faster than we’re upgrading it. This “cognitive crisis” or what I call “Intellectual Atrophy” (TM) is real, and it’s the very reason I created the Human Amplification Index (TM). The leaders who inspire me most right now are the ones who refuse to let automation dull their teams. They’re asking harder questions, remodeling workflows, and intentionally designing cultures where intelligence, creativity, and critical thinking remain the center of gravity.  If we design our environments with intention, humans don’t just keep up – we level up.