I recently saw a post on research stating that the use of ai tools will lead to reduced cognitive capacity with the evolving workforce. I thought it was a silly statement and clickbait research but it was from a Fortune 50 company (which I'm not going to promote) so i thought to myself WTF...
Ai is making our access to knowledge easier than ever. With easier access comes more exposure to ideas and influences. While some of this exposure can be negative, it undoubtedly increases our relative intelligence compared to previous generations. E.g. I am much smarter than my parents because I am empowered by technology and the resources it has allowed me to access while my parents fell behind and struggled.
One way we can illustrate this is in education. Recently I was helping a student understand factoring polynomials. They were given the problem to factor x^6+3x^5+(7/6)x^4+x^3+12
Can you see an acceptable answer before we start? If you do, how do you know you are correct?
Before the internet if you did not know what the answer was what would you do? Search textbooks? Ask a friend? What if you didn't have anyone capable of assisting you?
After the internet we began to ask questions of humanity's published knowledge (Google) and engage with others (Reddit, Stack Overflow) in far away locations to help answer our questions.
And now we are entering the age of the Question. That is that to say: By knowing the right questions to ask and how to retrieve information from Ai (and other data stores) you can rapidly increase your knowledge and understanding. This gives us a greater advantage and allows us to learn more at a faster pace than every before.
Challenges will abound and one such challenge is determining the best (or correct) solution from different resources just as it was in the good old Google days.
I asked 3 popular Ai chatbots to factor a complex polynomial x^6+3x^5+(7/6)x^4+x^3+12
What do you expect the answer to be? Did you arrive at it quickly?
Checkout the responses and the time to completion of OpenAI 03-mini-high , DeepSeek DeepThink R1 and xAi's Grok.
Response from Twitter's Grok
Response from OpenAi ChatGPT-03-mini-high
Response from DeepSeek DeepResearch R1
Comparing Ai Responses for Factoring a Polynomial