AI - Artificial Idiocracy

What my synapses failed to consider was the other side of that equation: that with the end of general ignorance, something else ends too. 
The effort of searching. 
And the relieved joy of finding. 
The conversation you had to have in order to get to a piece of information. 
The detour on which you often found more than what you were looking for. 

Above all, what was missing was the creative side of searching… associations, connections, and possible trails.

Google click-deleted our complete not-knowing. 
Cluelessness was wiped out with a single click. 
Convenient. Fast. Unstoppable.

But Google still had a residual stock of friction. 
You still had to read for yourself. 
Choose for yourself. 
Piece things together yourself. 
Google supplied the ingredients — but the cooking was still up to you.

AI now cooks alongside. 
And goes ahead and chews it all up for you too.

And that is the difference that won’t let me go, as I stare into my coffee this morning and think about these machines I use every single day — and which I, I will admit it, sometimes consult before I have even finished thinking my own thought.
AI is terrific in doing all the administrative and boring work. Or for doing extended research. 

The brain is not a hard drive. 
It is a muscle. 
Muscles need resistance. 
Not comfort.

When I was young — in the sixties and seventies in Switzerland — knowledge was something you had to go and fetch. 
You went to a library. 
You asked older people. 
You read things you didn’t understand, twice, three times, until they made sense. 
That was slow. 
That was sometimes frustrating. 
But that searching did something to the brain that Googling never did and that AI certainly doesn’t do: it built connections. Synapses shaped by friction.

Today I ask a machine, and the machine answers before my own thought has even made it around the bend. 
And I notice how tempting that is. 
How comfortable. 
How dangerously comfortable.

I’m not saying AI is evil. 
I use it. 
I find it fascinating. 
I experience what it can do — and sometimes I still marvel, exactly as I did back then, standing before the white search box of Google.

But the difference between Google and AI is not quantity. 
It is quality. 
Google took away our need to look things up. 
AI takes away our need to think. 

Specifically the thinking-before and the thinking-after. 
And those are two completely different interventions into what makes a thinking person.

Looking things up was always an auxiliary function.
Thinking things through is the heart of the matter.

And today, in this spring of 2026, I sit here in Newmarket, Ontario — a Swiss man in Canada, old hippie with a new passport, old-school storyteller — and I watch as an entire generation grows up that may never know thinking as the ache of a well-used muscle. 
Or already has. 
That will never know what it feels like when a thought emerges through resistance. 
And how the joyful rush takes flight when a person is caught in the act of a genuinely new thought. 
That joy, too, will have vanished.

That worries me more than any robot taking over a job. 
Because such changed situations need precisely those creative ideas to reshape politics in favour of the people — the voters.

Artificial Intelligence. Natural Bulimia.
The synapses are beginning to get bored.
The synapses are getting fat. 
Overweight, bored synapses?
Evolution simply did not foresee this. 
Or even dare to imagine it.