Are we becoming more intelligent, or simply better assisted?

A person with a capable assistant at hand can draft faster, summarize more, and answer questions outside their training. Measured by output, that person looks more intelligent than they did a few years ago. Measured by what they can do when the assistant is switched off, the picture is less clear. The two measurements are both legitimate. They are also measuring different things.

An old worry, with a real point

The concern is ancient. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of an Egyptian king who is offered the invention of writing and declines to celebrate it. Writing, the king says, will produce forgetfulness in those who learn it, because they will rely on marks outside themselves instead of remembering from within. They will appear to know much while knowing little.

It is easy to read this as a mistake. Writing made science, law, and literature possible, and nobody seriously wishes it undone. But the king was right about the mechanism. Literate cultures did let go of feats of memory that oral cultures trained hard to sustain. The trade was worth making. It was still a trade.

Every tool that extends a capability also changes which capabilities we practise.

Performance and capability are different things

The useful distinction is between what a person can produce with help and what a person has become able to do. A calculator raises arithmetic performance at once. Whether it raises or lowers mathematical capability depends on how it is used. A student who uses it to skip the stage where number sense forms ends up with less. An engineer who uses it to spend attention on the structure of a problem ends up with more.

The same tool, used the same way on the surface, can do either. What differs is where the effort goes. Assistance that removes effort from the part of a task where understanding is built tends to hollow the skill. Assistance that removes effort from the routine parts, and leaves the hard part to the person, tends to deepen it.

Three questions worth asking of any tool

This suggests a practical test, and it applies to individuals and institutions alike.

What am I still doing myself? If the answer is only approving what was produced, the skill of producing it is no longer being exercised.

Could I tell if the result were wrong? Evaluation depends on knowledge. When the knowledge behind a judgment fades, the judgment becomes a formality.

Which abilities do I want to keep without help? Not all of them. Few people regret losing the ability to navigate by the stars. But the list should be chosen, and not discovered after the fact.

An answer that depends on us

So are we becoming more intelligent or better assisted? Both are possible, sometimes in the same person on the same day. The technology does not settle it. The pattern of use does. That makes this less a question about machines than a question about habits, education, and the design of work, which is where human choices still decide the outcome.