Outsourcing your Brain.

So, I was having lunch with my niece - bright as a solar flare, on the brink of high school graduation, and dead set on becoming a Marine engineer. She's a brilliant, ambitious kid. Or so I thought until I realized her intellect was less a roaring ocean and more a kiddie pool with a malfunctioning filter.

As we munched on our overpriced salads, I noticed a peculiar glitch in her conversation. Every few sentences, she’d pause mid-thought, staring at me as if I’d just recited War and Peace backward or claimed I was the lovechild of Einstein and Beyoncé. But no, her stunned silence wasn’t awe .. it was the audible creaking of her mental gears. She was struggling to find basic words. Words like “chair” and “plan.” It was as if her vocabulary had staged a mass exodus, leaving her stranded with only a broken thesaurus and a nervous smile.

“Sneha,” I asked cautiously, “are you alright? Or has the Wi-Fi in your brain gone kaput?”

Her response hit me like a rogue baseball: “I don’t know... sometimes I forget words. I’m so used to ChatGPT finishing my sentences that when it’s not there, my brain feels... slower.”

Slower? Her brain wasn’t slow..it was dial-up internet s l o w. Turns out her school had introduced AI workshops, and now she relied on artificial intelligence for everything: essays, homework, even deciding which emoji to use in texts. Her mind, once a potential supercomputer, had downgraded to a glitchy MP3 player from 2003.

And this, dear friends, sent me spiraling into nostalgia. Remember those smug math teachers who’d wag their chalk-stained fingers and declare, “You must memorize this! You won’t have a calculator in your pocket!” Well, they were as wrong as my uncle’s wig on a windy day. But they weren’t entirely off the mark. They missed the part where our brains would stop being temples of knowledge and become dusty warehouses storing expired TikTok trends.

Today’s kids live in the golden era of mental outsourcing. Need the capital of Spain? Ask AI. Want a poem on rainy days? Copy-paste from ChatGPT. Forgot your anniversary? Let your phone do the groveling. But what happens when the machines crash? When the all-knowing algorithms throw a tantrum and stop working? Forget Marine engineering .. these kids won’t even know how to order chai without Siri guiding them.

So here we are, in the age of infinite intelligence, where the future is bright but perpetually buffering. And the tragedy? We’re not just losing words ..we’re losing ourselves.

Keep sailing, weekend has arrived.