Ryan Deiss: AI Threatens Our Intelligence Without Prior Reflection

Ryan Deiss, CEO of DigitalMarketer and founder of The Scalable Company, warns of a major risk in the age of artificial intelligence: the atrophy of critical thinking skills. According to him, workers who start by thinking before turning to AI will be the true winners of this new technological era.

Deiss expresses his concerns not about the acceleration of AI itself, but rather about the risk that humans will stop exercising their own thinking. In a post published on X on Monday, he compared this situation to industrialization, which changed our need for physical exercise. Once, physical labor was enough to keep us fit, but today, we must exercise to counteract sedentary lifestyles. Deiss fears that AI will make us "stupid" if we rely too heavily on it, stating that "the technology that made us obese will also make us dumb."

To counter this phenomenon, Deiss has established a rule for his team and his children, which he calls the 10-80-10 rule. This method involves starting a task with 10% of original human thought, allowing AI to handle 80% of the intermediate process, and then concluding with 10% of human judgment. This approach aims to prevent what he calls "de-slopification," a term referring to the production of low-quality content by AI.

This perspective is shared by other experts in the field. Mehdi Paryavi, CEO of the International Data Center Authority, warns that reliance on AI can erode workers' confidence in their skills. Anastasia Berg, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, emphasizes that this is particularly detrimental for young workers. They rely on AI from day one and never build the foundational knowledge necessary to understand what AI is actually doing.

The importance of this reflection was highlighted when Anthropic's Claude models experienced outages, revealing software developers' dependence on these tools. Some developers claimed that these interruptions illuminated how reliant they had become on AI tools to accomplish their work.

According to Deiss, individuals and brands that maintain the discipline of thinking first, instead of reflexively asking AI for answers, will have a structural advantage in an AI-powered world. "The advantage goes to those who invest the time to think and process," he wrote. "Because the people (and brands) who still choose to think will have all the advantages in an AI-driven world," he added.