The AI Divide: Why Most People Will Fall Behind

AI is the first technology in history that can replace our ability to think.

This sounds terrifying, but it could also be the biggest opportunity of our lives.

I had a strange realisation the other day, that every big shift in technology hasn’t just given us new tools, it has quietly taken over parts of what it means to be human.

Google replaced our need to remember facts.

Phones replaced our need to carry information.

Social media replaced parts of our social world, helping us to stay in contact with everybody, all the time.

But nothing has ever replaced our ability to think.

Until now.

For the first time, technology can replace thinking itself.

This is going to create a shift that not many people are ready for about.

A divide between two types of people:

• Those that will use AI to outsource thinking — defaulting to passive, shallow use.

• Those that will use AI to expand thinking — co-creating, stress-testing, and accelerating learning.

This difference looks small but it’s actually huge.

It's the gap between passive consumption and active learning.

The way I see it, there’s going to be a clear divide between people who use AI to think less and people who use AI to think better.

To me, this is the difference between watching someone else work out and actually doing the reps yourself.

AI can write your essays, answer your questions, even give you life advice. It can remove the friction of learning, the uncomfortable grind of wrestling with ideas. And many people will default to that path, outsourcing the hard part.

Here's the problem: when you outsource thinking, you also outsource understanding.

You miss the struggle that forges insight. You gain answers, but you don't actually learn.

On the other side are the people who will use AI differently. Not to bypass the struggle, but to deepen it. Not to hand over their thinking, but to sharpen it.

They’ll use AI as a sparring partner. A mirror. A way to stress-test their own ideas, add nuance, and see things from angles they’d never have reached alone.

That’s where the real leverage lies.

The Reframe That Changes Everything

I heard someone frame it like this:

"Don’t think of AI as replacing you. Think of it as you to the power of AI."

That reframe has stuck with me.

Because when I use AI in the right way, that’s exactly how it feels. Like an amplifier. Like my curiosity, creativity, and output all just got multiplied.

I can learn faster.

I can create more.

I can build systems I never could before.

Not because AI is doing it for me. But because AI is doing it with me.

Three Ways I’m Using AI

For me, it comes down to three pillars: learning, creating, and building.

1. Learning

I’ve always been someone who reads widely. Philosophy, psychology, performance, spirituality. But I’ve noticed I only learn deeply when the ideas connect back to my life, or to people I know.

AI has become the perfect bridge for that.

I’ll start with a raw brain dump of my thoughts, then drop it into ChatGPT and ask it to pick out the key concepts. I’ll ask follow-up questions: “What am I missing?” “If someone argued against this, what would they say?” “Where are the blind spots?”

Sometimes it sharpens the original idea. Other times it reveals the idea wasn’t that good to begin with. Either way, I come out thinking clearer than I went in.

That’s the key: AI isn’t thinking for me, it’s helping me think better.

2. Creating

This naturally flows into creating.

Once I’ve clarified an idea, I’ll ask ChatGPT to help structure it into a blog post. I’ll ask where I could add personal stories, what would make it more relatable, and how to make the argument stronger.

Because it’s already trained on over fifty of my past blogs, it has a decent sense of how I write. It can give me a draft that’s “decent.”

But that’s not the end. That’s where my work begins.

Most of my writing time these days is actually spent editing.

Deleting, cutting, refining until it it sounds like me.

AI gives me the base to work with, but the rewriting is still mine.

And because the blog becomes the outline for a YouTube video, the whole process compounds.

One idea becomes multiple pieces of content. One project fuels the next.

3. Building

The third pillar is building.

This is where AI gets even more exciting: helping me build systems that make my life and business smoother.

In an ideal world, I’d write a blog, film the YouTube video, and an AI agent would cut short-form clips, add captions, and distribute them across every platform automatically. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re close.

Right now, I use a tool called Opus AI to turn long videos into short clips with captions. With one click, it posts them to YouTube and TikTok.

The next step is AI agents — tools that can handle whole workflows, from research to publishing.

That’s coming fast. And when it does, the leverage will be enormous.

Projects as the Bridge

Here’s the lesson I keep returning to:

AI only makes sense in the context of a project.

It’s not enough to say, “I want to learn.” What makes the learning stick is using it to build something. For me, that’s writing blogs, creating videos, or designing new workflows.

Each project becomes a learning vehicle. A reason to engage. A place where learning, creating, and building converge.

Without that, it’s too easy to fall into passive use — asking AI random questions, letting it spit out answers, but never really doing the work yourself.

With projects, AI becomes a partner. It multiplies your efforts instead of replacing them.

The Choice Ahead

So here we are, standing at the edge of a shift bigger than Google, bigger than phones, bigger than social media.

For the first time, technology can replace thinking itself.

The question is: will you let it?

AI can make you think less, or it can make you think more.

It can dull your edge, or it can sharpen it.

For me, the choice is clear.

I want to stay in the fight.

I want to keep learning, keep creating, keep building.

And if I can do that with AI by my side, then maybe this really is me to the power of AI.

Adam