This is a piece I originally posted to my Instagram story in February 2026.

The 'standing on the shoulders of giants' stained glass at Chartres Cathedral
A stained-glass window at Chartres Cathedral depicting an evangelist perched on the shoulders of a prophet. This is the visual origin of the metaphor of “a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants.” Source: Wikimedia Commons

Long, long ago, in the infancy of computing, there was a thing called the punch card. You fed instructions into a computer by punching holes, one by one, into paper cards. To build a single program you had to stack hundreds or thousands of these cards in the right order, and if even one card slipped out of place, the program simply wouldn’t run. Programmers of that era had to understand the inner workings of the machine and the limits of the hardware perfectly, and they took pride in that.

But today, almost no one handles punch cards or peers inside a compiler anymore. And nobody sees this as a problem. By handing that intricate process over to our tools, we’ve been able to build larger and more complex systems on top of them.

There’s a lot of worry that AI will make students dumber. Out of this fear, some classrooms have gone so far as to strictly ban students from using AI.

But the era these very students will have to live and work in is one where using AI is mandatory. Telling them to prepare for a future ruled by AI while banning AI is a contradiction. The fear that human thinking will atrophy once tools start doing the thinking for us overlooks abstraction, which is the very essence of technological progress. Just as programmers of the past trusted the compiler and moved up to high-level languages, we are simply entrusting part of our intelligence to a tool called AI. What if, instead of seeing this as the decline of intelligence, we saw it as a shift in the layer of problems humans are meant to solve?

I don’t know every detail of how the countless components inside a computer connect to one another, exchange information, or are manufactured and from what materials. And yet I use computers to program and make a living without any real trouble. How is using AI any different from using a computer without understanding how it works? Does everyone holding a smartphone understand the principles of semiconductors?

Newton said he could see farther because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. AI is the most colossal giant of our age, a compression of all the intelligence and data humanity has accumulated.

Handing basic research or simple first drafts off to AI isn’t laziness; it’s the act of taking a step up onto the shoulders of the giant. By conserving the energy we used to burn on the grunt work, we get to learn how to survey the world from a height we never would have dared to imagine before.

In the end, what matters is what you choose to do with AI as your foothold. Now we have to focus on the problems even AI struggles to solve, which means moving beyond simply producing correct answers and toward the ability to define the problems themselves. The phenomenon of older skills being forgotten as tools advance isn’t decline; it’s a stage of evolution toward solving bigger problems. We ought to be looking at something greater from the shoulders of the giant we call AI.