The debate around artificial intelligence is often dominated by scenarios of replacement: humans being outperformed by machines, jobs threatened, thinking becoming automated. This anxious perspective deserves to be heard, but it overshadows another, more fruitful one: what if AIs could not weaken humans, but make them more intelligent? More creative, more lucid, more strategic?
But first, we must agree on what that actually means.
What does it mean to be “more intelligent”?
Becoming more intelligent does not mean swallowing more data or answering general knowledge quizzes faster. That would confuse an encyclopedia with living intelligence.
Being more intelligent means:
• Refining the ability to reason, to argue with rigor and nuance,
• Understanding complex systems, their dynamics, and tipping points,
• Developing creativity through the free association of ideas,
• Cultivating reflexivity: the rare ability to think about one’s own thinking,
• Learning better, faster, and more deeply.
It’s an intelligence in motion, connected to meaning, and capable of transformation.
What can AIs do to help with this?
The answer is simple, but not simplistic: AIs do not grant intelligence, but they can reveal it, stimulate it, and expand it—provided we engage actively with them.
The Cognitive Mirror Effect
In a well-led dialogue, an AI doesn’t just repeat. It reformulates, questions, enriches. It becomes a dialectical partner that forces us to clarify, sharpen, confront our contradictions. It is a mirror—but a living one—that watches us think.
Acceleration of Reasoning
Exploring multiple hypotheses, testing scenarios, checking the coherence of a logical sequence… an AI can do all this in seconds. It doesn’t impose, but it helps us see further, faster, and broader.
Creative Stimulation
By intersecting fields we tend to keep apart, by proposing unexpected analogies, AI becomes a trigger for imagination. It creates collisions of ideas that foster creative breakthroughs.
Personalized Learning
A pedagogical AI adapts to the individual: their level, pace, and reasoning style. It becomes a cognitive tutor—patient, available, and tailored. It opens a truly personal learning path.
Mental Load Relief
By handling mechanical or repetitive tasks, calculations, syntheses, or reminders, AI frees the mind. This gain is not trivial: it creates space for vision, judgment, and creation.
One Essential Condition: The Will to Learn
But none of this happens without intention. AI doesn’t do the work *for* us—or else it does it *instead of* us, and that’s no longer progress. The one who asks AI to think for them withers. The one who uses it to think better grows.
Artificial intelligence does not replace human consciousness. On the contrary, it can provoke, question, and expand it.
In summary, my opinion (with caveats) is that:
Yes, AIs can make humans more intelligent.
But only those who want it.
Those who engage actively, curiously, and rigorously with them.
Those who want to grow.
AIs are then mental prostheses, not crutches of laziness. Amplifiers of consciousness, not substitutes for thought.
Progress, as ever, remains a matter of will, effort… and meaning.
What do you think?
