Those of us who learned to drive before smartphones will remember getting lost. A wrong turn meant stopping to ask a shopkeeper for directions and eventually finding the right road back, and knowing the city a little better for it. Today, Google Maps tells us where to turn, and we arrive knowing almost nothing about the roads we took. Researchers at McGill University found that heavy GPS users had poorer spatial memory when they had to find their way unaided. This trade, an easier time today for a weaker skill tomorrow, is not new. What is new is its scale. And, GPS merely does our navigating, but artificial intelligence (AI) offers to do our thinking and knowledge gathering. This is the friction paradox: The effort we are so eager to remove is often what makes us capable.

The clearest evidence of this comes from a classroom. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied nearly 1,000 high-school students in Turkey learning mathematics. Those who practised with ChatGPT solved far more problems correctly. But in the exam, without the chatbot, they scored 17% worse than classmates who never used AI. Parents understand this instinctively; it is why we don’t do our children’s homework for them.

Evidence shows that beginners gain the most from AI, and also lose the most. In a large study of customer-service agents, AI raised the productivity of........

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