Welcome to the March 2026 issue of Ken’s Korner Newsletter

I often hear how Artificial Intelligence makes people dumber. While that may be true in some cases, I don’t believe that is what is really happening. It is just part of the evolution we are living in.

Some years ago, I started my career in the car business. Breaker point ignitions and carbureted engines were the rule, and everybody knew (to some degree) how to work on them. And those systems require a lot of work. You could hardly get ten thousand miles without a tune up and a car with one hundred thousand miles was probably on its way to the junkyard.

Advances in metallurgy, materials, electronics, improved design and modern manufacturing have changed all that. Now cars have direct ignition and fuel injection, and they last a lot longer. They require much less maintenance, but a skilled technician can still work on them. These days a car with one hundred thousand miles is common and often just a good used car. While we have a lot more cars on the road now, they are safer and more comfortable to drive. Also, an auto technician is a highly skilled good paying job. All part of the evolution we are living through. We survived these changes. In fact, some of us made pretty good money working on these new systems Artificial intelligence will be the same way

AI isn’t replacing you. It is redefining what valuable is.

As an engineer AI isn’t going to take your job, The engineer with AI skills will. As a code developer AI isn’t going to take your job, The code writer with AI skills will.

AI writes code. But it doesn't understand your business context, your system's quirks, or why that "ugly" workaround exists. The developers who thrive won't be the fastest coders, they'll be the ones who can think through the situation, architect, review, and think critically about what AI produces. Your judgment is the product now.

For tech support AI is a gift. Chatbots handle the easy tickets. That's a gift, not a threat. It frees you to handle complex, high-stakes problems where empathy and deep troubleshooting matter. The human in the loop becomes more valuable, not less.

The real challenge isn’t AI vs. Humans. It’s:

1. Routine work, the boring stuff, becomes automated.
2. Complex judgment becomes more in demand.
3. AI plus Domain expertise becomes the winning combination.

The people who struggle with AI aren't those in any specific role. They're the ones who fail to learn how AI fits into their craft.

Use Your Brain

MIT just finished one of the first cognitive studies on ChatGPT’s impact and the outcomes felt uncomfortably familiar, in fact I would say scary. Over four months, researchers scanned the brains of three groups performing the same writing task, one wrote manually, one used Google Search, and one used ChatGPT.

The starkest changes were seen in the AI group. 83% of ChatGPT users couldn’t recall even one sentence they had written minutes earlier. Brain connectivity dropped 47%. Mental effort the engine of learning fell by 33%. Yes, work got done faster. But the brain was barely engaged in getting it done.

But MIT found a simple fix to this “Cognitive Downloading”. Start with your own ideas, then bring AI later to polish, refine, and expand. When AI becomes a collaborator, we grow. When it becomes the first draft, we lose the ability to create one ourselves. So, make sure that you are the one driving, not the machine!

We’ve seen this happen before. Handwriting made us remember typing didn’t. Photos replaced observation. GPS replaced navigation. Every tool that reduces effort also reduces the brain’s function behind that effort.

Efficiency is not always intelligence. Speed is not always learning.

The takeaway isn’t “stop using AI.” It’s something more important, don’t let AI think before you do. You decide the topic for the article. Let AI fill in the details. You decide what data you want. Let AI go out and mine it for you.

AI doesn’t make our brains weaker, passive usage does. If we want sharper memory, stronger thinking, and real creativity, the process still must start in the human brain. Let AI accelerate you not replace your ability to run.

I do not think that banning AI is possible at this point. Nor is it even necessary. AI isn’t replacing humans. It’s replacing the parts of our brain we no longer use.

Which way forward?
Do we move towards singularity? Implanting electrodes directly into the human brain to integrate them more tightly with the AI. Supposedly people become smarter, stronger, more beautiful and so on. Part human and part machine. Sort of a Homo Mechanicus. The human that can access any information at will.

Or do the humans just atrophy like barnacles on a ship while the machine part does all the work. To guard against this, we need to focus on the human component instead of the machine. Instead of trying to build better machines cultivate better, smarter, stronger, faster and more attractive humans. Something more like the Mentats in Frank Herbert’s Dune novels.

Look for more articles about where are we going with this AI thing in future edition of this newsletter.

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And remember — always back it up!