Are We Going Backwards, Again?

Believe it or not, when I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist. Tintin was my favourite comic, and I was obsessed with the idea of exploring old ruins, finding hidden places, and learning what people were doing thousands of years before us.

I’ve been to a few ancient sites already, but there are still two sitting right at the top of my list. One is Göbeklitepe, a place around 7,000 years older than the pyramids, this place caught my attention a few years ago, and I still plan to visit it one day. Same with Abu Simbel, in Egypt, because both make me wonder how much humans have built, understood, lost, and then had to rediscover later.

We don’t need to pretend Göbeklitepe proves some lost high-tech civilisation, because it doesn’t. The part that gets me is stranger than that anyway, because people that far back were still able to build something that makes us stop and ask what else we’ve underestimated, misunderstood, buried, reinterpreted, and argued over thousands of years later.

Now, before you stop reading, I’m in no way talking about ancient aliens here, and this doesn’t need to become a History Channel episode at 2am, but idk, it had me thinking... maybe some people in the past knew more than we give them credit for, and then something changed, time passed, and the knowledge vanished.

You see, I wonder about this kind of thing on a regular basis (again, not talking about aliens). I’m talking about losing knowledge. Like, incrementally forgetting how to do the thing yourself because the thing got done for you over and over.

That’s how I ended up thinking about AI agents, because they’ve moved past the chat box now. The useful ones can control your entire computer and do whatever you ask it to do.

And I don’t want to make every call. God no. I just don’t want to lose the ability to know when something’s wrong.

That part has to stay mine. If I let AI make the call too often because it’s faster, making the call myself starts feeling like a chore.

That’s the future I worry about now anyway, because you might not wake up stupid overnight, you’d just get dumber without noticing.

Maybe progress has always turned both ways

That’s where it starts feeling bigger than AI, because maybe going forwards and backwards isn’t as separate as we like to think.

Much like a helix (or those iridescent wind spinners), your brain can see it turning one way, but you can trick yourself into thinking it’s going the opposite way.

That’s why I find this stuff so fascinating, because patterns show up everywhere once you start noticing them. You can gain something on one side and lose something on another, which is how a tool can be progress and a trade-off at the same time.

And perhaps with AI, that trade-off matters. If it helps you to develop your thinking and you still make the call yourself, it spins one way. If it becomes the thing that decides, explains, remembers, and fixes everything for you, it spins the other way.

The difference isn’t AI or no AI

Most of us will end up using AI somewhere, even if we don’t realise it. The real difference might be between people who stay in control and people who hand control away because it’s easier.

Some will use it to avoid thinking, and from the outside they might look just as productive for a while.

Until something breaks, and then you find out who still knows how to think without AI doing it for them.

So where are we heading?

This is probably the closest I’ve come to doing the thing I wanted to do as a kid, which is funny because I’m not standing in a desert with a brush in my hand; I’m sitting here looking at AI and wondering what future humans might say about us.

I don’t think we’re heading toward one clean future, because I think AI will make some people sharper and some people, well... not as sharp. And perhaps AI gets dumber too, if it ends up learning from more AI output than actual human thinking.

All of this makes "should we use AI?" feel like the wrong question.

Perhaps the better question is, what are we still practising while we use it? Because if I stop practising something for long enough, I should probably expect to lose it.

Maybe that’s the part I keep going back to with Göbeklitepe and Abu Simbel. What survives? What disappears? What did people once understand so well that nobody left enough behind for us to see the full picture?

If you’re using an agent and it disappeared tomorrow, what would you still know how to do, and what would future-you have to dig back up?