The Final Frontier of Outsourcing: Your Own Thoughts
The history of outsourcing is basically a timeline of humans trying to get rid of things they don’t want to do.
Phase 1 was the "Muscle" era. Back in the 80s and 90s, if it involved heavy lifting, assembly lines, or sewing machines, it got shipped offshore. We outsourced the physical grind. We got cheaper sneakers and flat-screen TVs, and we told ourselves, "Well, this makes sense. We are moving towards a service economy."
Phase 2 was the "Process" era. The internet got fast, and the world got flat. Suddenly, we realized we didn't just have to outsource the making of the widgets; we could outsource the support for them, too. Call centres, IT help desks, data entry, and payroll. We outsourced the boredom.
And through all of this, the "knowledge workers" - felt pretty safe. We (I am a knowledge worker too) sat in our comfortable chairs and said, "You can have the factory floor, and you can have the spreadsheet data entry, but the Thinking? The Strategy? The Creativity? That stays here. That is the Human Value Add. Machines can't dream."
Phase 3? The latest thing to be outsourced isn't your laundry or your tax return. It’s your mind. We are actively outsourcing the heavy lifting of cognition, imagination, and basic problem-solving to Artificial Intelligence. And honestly? It’s probably one of the worst trade deals in the history of trade deals.
Like most paradigm changing phenomena, it starts simply and innocently enough. You need an email subject line. You need a recipe for leftover chicken and questionable spinach. You need some ideas for a gift for some family members. You ask the chatbot. It gives you a solid B+ answer. You copy, you paste, you do and you move on.
But then things become a bit more complicated. "Hey AI, give me 10 business ideas that can make me $10k a month and the execution strategy for each." "Hey AI, take my picture and make me look like Ghibli art." "Hey AI, tell me how to feel about the current geopolitical climate."
Suddenly, the "spark" - that weird, messy, chaotic firing of neurons that gave us fire, the wheel, and SpongeBob SquarePants - is being replaced by a predictive text algorithm on steroids. We aren't using AI to do the boring stuff so we can focus on the creative stuff. We are handing over the creative stuff because thinking is hard.
Here is the thing about our AI friends: it doesn't have an imagination. It has a dataset. AI is essentially a very well-read parrot with a photographic memory. It works by predicting the next logical word based on everything humans have already written. It is a regurgitation engine. It chews up the collective works of human history and spits out a remix.
If we all stop thinking and just let the AI handle it, where does the new stuff come from? Innovation comes from weirdos. It comes from mistakes. It comes from two totally unrelated ideas crashing into each other in a human brain at 3 AM. An algorithm doesn't have "shower thoughts."
And let’s not gloss over the fact that our new "External Brain" can be a bit of pathological liar. We’ve all seen it - it creates total fiction, but it delivers the lie with the unearned confidence of a mediocre man in a boardroom.
When we outsource our thinking to a machine that hallucinates facts, we aren't just becoming less creative; we are becoming untethered from reality. We are building a world on a foundation of "sounds about right," rather than "is actually true."
Here is the endgame scenario: The Snake Eating Its Own Tail.
Right now, AI models are trained on human content. But as the internet floods with AI-generated blogs, AI-generated art, and AI-generated code, future models will be trained on that content. AI training on AI. A copy of a copy of a copy.
The signal degrades. The quality drops. Original thought doesn't just stagnate; it goes extinct. We become a species of curators, endlessly scrolling through options generated by a machine that is slowly forgetting what it means to be human.
So, What Now?
Look, I’m not saying we smash the servers. I’m using a computer to write this and I used my AI friend to generate the image (I did supply the imagination, though, in the form of the prompt). But maybe, just maybe, we should keep at least some of the "thinking" part for ourselves. Let the AI do the scheduling. Let it organize the spreadsheets. Let it debug the code. Let it make our life simpler so we can think more and be bored - because that's where ideas and answers come from.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go stare at a wall and try to have an original thought. It’s harder than it looks.