A year ago, writing felt like work. Now, it feels like editing. Open any generative AI assistant, type a prompt, and within seconds, you’ll have an article, email, or presentation. Every aspect of writing, fixing grammar, structuring sentences, and having a particular tone, has been automated. Except for one part of the process that remains stubbornly human – Thinking.
Thinking is the new Scarcity
Society has always been driven by scarcity. Water is valuable in a desert because it’s scarce. Skilled workmanship is expensive because not everyone can do it. Gold is a luxury because it’s limited.
There was a time not long ago when writing required a skill set, a vision, storytelling, and considerable effort and time. Now, you can generate a well-written article in seconds. Therefore, today writing has become abundant. It has not become useless. It just means that something else has become scarce.
Today, that scarcity is thinking.
AI can’t think for you; it can only generate for you
AI is a perfect mirror of your existing opinions and ideas. It reflects your knowledge, curiosity, and limitations. Ask AI to generate a new thought, and you’ll find its limitations.
As a human, you have an advantage over AI. You can think. Original thinking can make you stand out. You assume AI begins with a prompt, but in reality, it begins with a thought. AI can expand on your thoughts, but it isn’t a source of them. The seed of thought comes from your unique brain.
And no, AI won’t become better at thinking anytime soon either. It’s only going to become better at generating. Therefore, the quality of AI’s output depends heavily on the quality of your thinking.
AI is a retriever, not an inventor
Imagine AI as a librarian who has read millions of books, research papers, and articles and remembers where every idea and piece of information lives, and can retrieve the useful ones for you in seconds.
Ask AI for information, summary, five different perspectives, and it will find it, condense it, and bring it to your table. That’s an extraordinary ability to have.
But notice what the librarian isn’t doing. They are not writing the books. And every library depends on people to create new knowledge.
Therefore, AI needs original human work to organize and to draw from.
AI can’t shelve everything
AI can’t shelve a conversation you had with a friend this morning. AI can’t shelve an observation you had while watching two people working together. AI can’t shelve a realization you just had after months of confusion. These experiences aren’t yet a part of the internet. They have not been written and published yet. They exist only in the human mind.
Until you share it, AI has nothing to retrieve. That’s why original thinking remains valuable. AI relies on you to write tomorrow’s books.
AI has access. That doesn’t make it wise
If access to knowledge alone created wisdom, every chatbot would be the best philosopher. Imagine walking into the world’s largest library. Every book ever written is within your reach. Now, imagine asking a librarian if you should quit your job and start a business. The librarian can extract relevant books on how to start a business, can explain different strategies, and show you successful case studies. However, it can’t tell you which decision is right for you.
The perfect answer is not wisdom. Wisdom dwells along with uncertainty. Whereas AI is programmed to reduce uncertainty. Life rarely works that way. Here, lived experience, human judgement, and intuition are far more valuable than a perfect answer.
Final Thought – Thinking is your superpower
With AI, you probably have stopped thinking too soon. AI makes it easy to settle for the obvious. Today, if you need a headline, a structure, or a strategy, you ask AI first. You have outsourced your thinking to AI, which is why, after seeing the output, you have to think again. Thinking again creates better questions and, therefore, better output. Ironically, AI challenges your thinking by pushing you beyond the obvious.
So, do not forget, thinking is your superpower in this era. Outsourcing it will only generate ordinary results.
