Convenience is wonderful until it becomes dependency

There was a time when I knew the phone numbers of my friends by heart. Not just one or two, but dozens of them. Addresses too. Trips to the South of France were planned with a paper map on your lap, a road atlas beside you, and long discussions about which route around Paris would be faster. You knew where you were because you had been paying attention.

Today, we hardly need to remember anything, because everything lives inside our phones. Navigation tells us where to go, contacts tell us who to call, and increasingly AI tells us what to write, think or decide.

Technology is no longer just helping us with physical tasks. It is gradually taking over mental processes that once formed part of everyday human thinking. Memory, orientation, analysis and even problem solving.

If someone asked me years ago where I was driving, I usually knew exactly. Today I glance at the GPS before answering.

These developments don't make us less intelligent. We have simply started using our brains differently and intelligence itself is changing direction. From remembering to interpreting, from knowing to selecting and from calculating ourselves to judging whether the technology is actually right. And maybe that is the real challenge with AI.

Not whether AI becomes smarter than humans, but whether humans remain curious, critical and capable of independent thought while technology increasingly thinks for us.

Let's face it. Convenience is wonderful until convenience becomes dependency...