I can’t point to a single moment when I started noticing it. There wasn’t one presentation, one LinkedIn post, or one conversation that suddenly made me concerned. It was more like watching the tide come in.
A hundred small moments over the past few years.
Someone confidently sharing information they hadn’t verified. Someone presenting an AI-generated answer they clearly didn’t understand. Someone asking a question that wasn’t really a question at all. They were looking for an answer before they’d spent any time understanding the problem.
Individually, none of these moments stood out. But together, they started to form a pattern.
The pattern wasn’t that AI was giving people bad information.
The pattern was that people were becoming increasingly comfortable accepting information they didn’t fully understand.
That’s not a new behavior.
I’ve spent most of my career teaching technology. Long before AI, I watched people memorize steps without understanding concepts (hello exam dumps). I watched students focus on passing exams instead of learning the material. I watched organizations buy technology hoping it would solve problems they hadn’t clearly defined.
Humans have always looked for shortcuts.
AI just happens to be the most powerful shortcut we’ve ever created.
The risk isn’t that AI gives us answers.
The risk is that it gives us answers so quickly, and so convincingly, that we stop at the answer.
We mistake having a response for having understanding.
And those are not the same thing.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized this wasn’t really an AI problem. AI just made it easier to see. The same pattern has shown up with every shortcut we’ve ever invented. Search engines. Certification dumps. Copy-and-paste code. Best practices repeated without context. The technology changes. The temptation doesn’t.
Understanding has a cost that answers don’t. It asks you to sit with a problem before you reach for a solution, to notice what you don’t know, to be a little uncomfortable for a little longer. AI hasn’t removed that cost. It’s just made it optional. And the people who keep paying it anyway, who use the fast answer as a starting point instead of a stopping point, are going to pull further and further ahead of the people who don’t.
The cost shows up later, and somewhere else. The answer you didn’t understand becomes the decision you can’t defend, the system you can’t fix when it breaks, the conversation where you can’t go one question deeper. Understanding is what lets you keep going when the answer runs out. Skipping it doesn’t make the work disappear. It just moves the work to a moment when you’re least prepared for it.
So here’s the question I’ve started asking myself, sometimes even a beat too late: do I actually understand this, or do I just have something to say about it? The honest answer is humbling more often than I’d like. But the question itself is the whole discipline. AI will hand you an answer for almost anything now. It still can’t tell you whether you understand it.
That part is, and always has been, on you.
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