I use artificial intelligence almost every day. It's remarkable technology. It helps me research, solve problems, and explore new ideas. Frankly, I'm amazed by what it can do. Maybe you are the same way. But I have a concern. AI can make a smart person smarter. It can also make a stupid person more confidently stupid. Here's what I mean.

AI is imperfect. It makes mistakes, sometimes invents facts, forgets things, and can be remarkably agreeable with the person asking the questions. Worse, it doesn't always recognize when it's wrong. Unless someone challenges its conclusions, a conversation can continue down the wrong path with extraordinary confidence.

And some people are perfectly happy to let that happen. Thinking takes effort. It's often easier to ask AI to do the work, accept the answer, and move on. For someone inclined to take the easiest path, AI offers a wonderful opportunity to avoid thinking altogether.

But there's another issue that interests me even more. AI is particularly good at showing us where others have already traveled. It draws upon enormous amounts of existing knowledge and experience. That's valuable. After all, conventional wisdom often reflects lessons learned through years of trial and error. Following a proven path can be a perfectly sensible decision.

But consider that destination. If we follow the same roads everyone else has traveled, we're likely to arrive at places others have already discovered. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Sometimes it's exactly where we want to go.

But what if there's a better destination? During my years teaching entrepreneurship, I encouraged aspiring entrepreneurs to challenge assumptions, question conventional wisdom, and look for opportunities others had overlooked. The most interesting ideas weren't always the most popular. Some sounded impractical.

Others seemed downright crazy. But occasionally, an unconventional idea revealed an opportunity that conventional thinking had missed. That's the nature of innovation. Original thinking can take us to new and better places, but it also carries the risk of being wrong. Being different doesn't make you right. But being conventional doesn't make you right either.

And the crowd can be wrong. This brings me back to something I've written about before. Ignorance is not knowing. Stupidity is refusing to reconsider. Dishonesty is knowing better and pretending otherwise. AI can help cure ignorance by providing extraordinary access to information. But it cannot cure stupidity. That requires curiosity, humility, and the willingness to question our own conclusions.

So how should we use AI? Ask it to research the familiar roads. Learn from the experience of others. Understand why conventional solutions have worked. Then challenge it. Ask what everyone might be overlooking. Explore the unconventional alternatives. Question the assumptions. And don't be afraid to pursue an idea that initially seems unreasonable. Just remember to test it against reality.

AI can help us find the road. But we still have to decide where we want to go.

John Bradley Jackson

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P.S. "Artificial intelligence is no match for actual stupidity." - Classic Tech
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