Outsourcing a task can give us the result, without making us any wiser about how to solve simlar problems.

Struggling to solve a problem forces us to work through the ideas, making what we learn more likely to stick.

We're not immune to the "computer disease": mistaking the power of a tool for its applicability.

Each time your Maps app calculates the fastest route to your destination, it relies on an algorithm Edsger W. Dijkstra invented decades ago. As a pioneering computer scientist, the Dutch mathematician laid the groundwork for much of modern software design, but there's another area that he made important contributions to: our thinking about thinking itself.

You might imagine that one of the founding fathers of computing would have relied on machines to solve the hardest problems. In reality, it was quite the opposite. He insisted on doing the vast majority of thinking away from a keyboard. Much of his work started out meticulously handwritten with a fountain pen.

The question of how we think about thinking, and more specifically, which part of our thinking should be left to computers, is particularly relevant today. AI is rapidly approaching a point where we can offload the substance of our work to it. We're well past a world of merely outsourcing physical labor; today, we are increasingly able to let AI handle the bulk of our creative and analytical work.

That's a nice thing, because we get what we need with little effort. But when we outsource a task wholesale, without really understanding what went into the output, we're missing some of the real benefit.

Whenever we work, we produce two kinds of output: the work product and the learning that........

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