We are told almost daily that artificial intelligence is rotting our brains. We are warned that it distorts our view of the world — amplifying some things, suppressing others, and quietly erasing what does not fit the prevailing narrative.
Those critics are not wrong. But they are not telling the whole story.
What is missing from the picture is the way artificial intelligence can also sharpen the mind rather than dull it — how it can, in the right hands, make us more thoughtful, more attentive to context, and ultimately wiser.
Just today, while studying a series of historical events, I asked for a detailed explanation of the difference between a wheel-lock and a flintlock musket. On the surface this sounds like a technical footnote. In reality, it changed how I understand army sizes, logistics, and the dynamics of battle itself. Without AI, pursuing such a detail would have been prohibitively time-consuming, and I likely would have skipped it altogether. A small piece of practical knowledge suddenly reframed the larger historical picture.
But there is something even more important that AI restores: the lost art of asking questions.
Ask a foolish question and you will get a foolish answer. Ask an intelligent question and you will get a meaningful one. Ask a truly insightful question and you may receive a brilliant one.
Not every question needs to be brilliant. What matters is the rediscovery of a simple truth our culture has largely forgotten: questions are at least as important as answers. Almost every day, people write to me who have no questions at all. They are emotionally energized by some claim or headline and feel compelled to broadcast their outrage or enthusiasm. But they are not genuinely curious. The issue is not an answer to any real question they are asking — because they are not asking any.
Thinking without questions is the most dangerous kind of mental numbness.
Every serious introduction to philosophy or disciplined thinking begins with questions. Yet today we tend to mine Plato for isolated quotations and tidy conclusions, stripping them of the living inquiry that produced them. Ironically, it is often the questions themselves — not the polished answers — that remain the most valuable and intellectually fertile part of the tradition.
In a culture drowning in instant opinions and manufactured certainties, a tool that rewards careful questioning may be doing something quietly countercultural — and quietly civilizing.