I still remember a few phone numbers from when I was a kid.
Strangely, I remember some of those better than numbers I use today.
Back then, if I wanted to call someone, I actually had to know the number.
Now I don't.
I type a name.
My phone knows the rest.
I hadn't thought about that in years.
Then all the recent conversations about AI dependency made me wonder:
When did I actually start depending on technology this much?
It definitely wasn't when I started using AI.
First, I stopped remembering numbers
My phone became my memory for contacts.
That happened so naturally that I barely noticed it.
And to be clear, I don't miss memorizing phone numbers.
It's a perfect job for a phone.
But it was probably one of the first times I casually handed something I used to remember to a device instead.
Then I stopped remembering routes
Navigation changed in the same way.
I used to remember routes because I had to.
Take this street.
Turn at that building.
Walk until you see that intersection.
Today I can arrive in a city I've never visited before and let GPS handle almost everything.
It's incredibly useful.
But sometimes I visit the same place several times and realize I still couldn't get there without opening the map.
That's a strange feeling.
I've been there.
But I don't really know the way.
My phone does.
Even finding places changed
Restaurants might be the example I notice most when traveling.
Search the area.
Check the rating.
Read the reviews.
Look at the photos.
Choose one.
It works.
It probably saves me from plenty of bad meals.
But I also wonder how many places I would have discovered if I hadn't already seen what everyone else recommended.
I used to think of technology mostly as giving me more information.
Now I think it also changes the path I take to make a decision.
AI feels new, but the pattern doesn't
Then AI arrived.
And suddenly people started asking:
Are we outsourcing too much?
Are we going to stop thinking for ourselves?
Are we becoming dependent?
Those are reasonable questions.
But the pattern itself feels familiar.
My phone remembers numbers.
GPS remembers routes.
Search engines find information.
Algorithms recommend what I should watch, buy, and visit.
Now AI can help structure a thought, write a paragraph, debug code, or suggest a decision.
The difference is that this time we're not only outsourcing memory or discovery.
We're starting to outsource parts of reasoning.
Maybe that's why AI feels more uncomfortable.
I use AI anyway
I'm not writing this as someone who wants to avoid AI.
I use it a lot.
Especially in development.
It helps me explore approaches faster, review things I might have missed, and sometimes get unstuck.
I don't think making myself slower on purpose would somehow make me a better developer.
But there is one boundary I keep thinking about.
I don't mind if AI remembers something for me.
I don't even mind if it suggests an answer.
What I don't want is to reach a point where I can't tell:
why I believe the answer is right.
That matters to me much more than whether I produced every line completely by myself.
Maybe dependence isn't the right question
We already depend on technology.
Deeply.
Turn off the internet, maps, messaging, search, cloud storage, and smartphones for a week and most of us would feel it immediately.
So maybe asking whether we should depend on technology is already too late.
A more interesting question might be:
Which parts of ourselves are we comfortable handing over?
I was happy to hand over phone numbers.
I was happy to hand over navigation.
I'm mostly happy to let search engines remember the internet for me.
AI makes the question harder because the thing being handed over can be closer to thinking itself.
The strange thing is that none of this felt dramatic while it was happening.
Nobody took my ability to remember phone numbers away.
I just stopped needing it.
Nobody forced me to forget routes.
GPS was simply easier.
Technology usually doesn't take something from us.
It gives us enough convenience that we slowly stop doing it ourselves.
That's why the AI conversation feels less like the beginning of something new to me now.
It feels more like the next chapter of something we've been doing for years.
AI wasn't the beginning.
The smartphone in my pocket had already started the lesson.
