I keep seeing the same argument about AI making us dumber. It's the same argument people had about search engines, and before that books. The usual response is to point at history and say "every generation panics, every generation was wrong, relax." I think that response is half right, and the wrong half is what bothers me. Tools change what we bother to remember. The people who'd trained their whole lives to memorize 10,000-line oral epics watched the craft die when writing showed up. Long arithmetic in your head used to be normal; calculators arrived and the payoff for keeping that skill sharp went away. Brains didn't shrink. The skills just stopped being worth practicing. Search engines are the one I lived through. I was a kid when Google replaced Altavista and went from "useful" to being a synonym for finding things . I still remember being amazed that I could search for a zebra and have a picture of one on my screen in only five minutes.…