Some thoughts around the AI topic

I remember the debates back in the 70s and 80s about whether students should be allowed to use calculators during math tests. The fear was simple: if we relied on calculators, we would stop learning the multiplication tables.

The calculator won.

I can still remember the phone number of the house where I grew up, but I don’t know my wife’s current number by memory. GPS made it possible for me to drive anywhere, but without it I would struggle to navigate my own city.

Laziness or efficiency? Probably a bit of both. And the unused skills withered away.

That’s what concerns me about AI.

In business today, algorithms can price products, screen candidates, forecast demand, and even suggest strategy. In stable systems, they are extremely powerful.

But executive decisions are rarely stable.

• Hiring a key executive.
• Entering a new market.
• Walking away from a deal that looks good on paper.

These decisions live in human context. Timing, incentives, trust, and reputation matter. A seasoned owner builds judgment through years of consequences, wins and losses that create pattern recognition no dashboard can fully capture.

If calculators reduced mental arithmetic and GPS reduced spatial memory, what happens if AI reduces our habit of thinking independently?

Tools are not the problem but blind delegation is. The question isn’t if AI is useful. It clearly is. The question is if we will still be able to think clearly when the model is not available or if we are going to identify when the model is wrong. That would put us all at their mercy.