Use It, Lose It

You've probably felt it when the AI gives an answer and you think: Should I check this? Do I even know how?

That hesitation?

Your expertise sending up a flare.

Every time you use AI, you choose about your own capability.

Not consciously.

But the choice is there.

London cab drivers spend 3-4 years memorizing 25,000 streets…"The Knowledge." Brain scans showed their hippocampi enlarged from this practice.

They could navigate anywhere without maps.

Then GPS arrived.

New drivers used it from day one. The GPS-reliant drivers showed no hippocampal growth.

Veteran drivers who switched to GPS showed hippocampal shrinkage within months.

Same streets. Same destinations. Different tool relationship.

Brain changes mapped to whether they exercised judgment or delegated it.

The difference wasn't the tool. It was the relationship.

When you supervise AI…treating its output as a proposal, not a conclusion…you exercise judgment on every interaction.

You compare the AI's reasoning to your model of the problem.

You notice when something's off.

You build intuition about the tool's strengths and hallucination tendencies.

You're getting reps.

Accepting AI output uncritically does the opposite.

You delegate judgment, which means you don't practice it.

Judgment atrophies without use.

The cruel part?

Both paths feel productive. Both drivers reach their destinations.

The divergence stays invisible until suddenly it's not…until you need to make a call without the AI and realize you're not sure you can anymore.

This isn't about AI being bad.

It's about interface design: What muscle does this tool make you use?

A calculator doesn't make you worse at math if you understand the calculation.

It becomes a problem when you… 

forget how to estimate… 

can't tell if an answer makes sense

just trust the output

Same with AI.

Now, are you supervising or accepting? Are you building judgment or borrowing it?

The most dangerous moment isn't when AI makes a mistake.

It's when you can't tell it did.

That capability…to evaluate, sense wrongness, and know when you need judgment…is what's at stake in every interaction.

Use it or lose it.

The interface decides.