In one of his famous dialogues, Socrates admitted that he “knows nothing except that he knows nothing,” highlighting the fact that true knowledge begins with realizing the limits of human ignorance. From Plato, who warned in the Myth of the Cave against being satisfied with the shadows of truth, through the French thinker Michel Foucault and his analysis of the connection between knowledge and power, all the way to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and his criticism of technology’s takeover of consciousness; The question remains: What is knowledge and how is it managed? Today, the question returns with urgency in light of a radical transformation dictated by artificial intelligence tools, a transformation that is not limited to a passing technical innovation. Rather, it touches the heart of the way knowledge is formed and transmitted between people.
Modern AI tools, such as ChatGPT and others, have changed the nature of the relationship between humans and information. After knowledge required intellectual effort and arduous research to discover meaning; With these tools, it has become an immediate and canned consumption of knowledge. One no longer needs long journeys between the pages of books or deep thinking to derive wisdom; Rather, it is enough for him to ask his question to an intelligent algorithm to get a ready answer. This shift produced a form of extended cognitive dependence; That is, the processes of remembering and analyzing are no longer confined to the brains alone; Rather, it has extended to digital repositories and algorithms that help minds and influence their working methods. Although this expansion promises to increase efficiency, it requires careful governance so that expansion does not turn into a replacement that weakens the faculties of understanding and confirmation.
A research experiment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) shows that writing with the help of linguistic models reduces brain connections in attention and creativity networks, and that those who used these tools remembered and understood less of what they wrote. In the same social context, a report from the University of Oxford records that users – despite their increased speed – tend to have synthetic thinking. Fluency in processing is matched by atrophy in depth and independence. The latest indicators of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) issued by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reveal a widespread decline in reading and mathematics in developed countries, within a digital context that tempts with brevity and superficiality.
The paradox increases when the immediate answers are similar and lack the human touch and the spirit of innovation. As the ease of access to information increases, the ability of awareness to consolidate and interpret it decreases. Here, global advisory reports indicate that value does not come from speed of production; Rather, it is about transforming speed into meaning. McKinsey indicates in its reports on the state of artificial intelligence (2023-2025) that the return is achieved when the freed time is redirected towards higher-value work. Deloitte stresses the need to combine human judgment with machine capabilities within clear frameworks of trust and accountability. While Gartner warns in adoption cycles of widening governance gaps and risks – such as bias and security – unless they are addressed with strict methodologies.
We do not cite this evidence to condemn the technology; Rather, let us remind you that the brain needs “friction” to learn, and that rational knowledge management is neither the accumulation of documents nor the acceleration of knowledge production. Rather, it is an ethics of thinking and an approach to setting questions before consuming the answers. In practice, what is required is to keep the difference clear between assistance and replacement. To harness the tool to expand the horizon of significance, and to make statistical consistency a bridge to vigilant human wisdom. At this point, the wisdom of philosophers meets the lesson of contemporary management. Speed is not condemned because it is speed, but rather when truth is reduced to it and understanding is dispensed with. If history has taught us that writing, printing, and the Internet expanded the horizon of thought when we used them to reorganize our memory and our arguments, then the duty of the moment is to better direct artificial intelligence to be a multiplier of curiosity and depth of meaning, not a substitute for them. Knowledge management advances with speed in media, depth in intentions, and memory that perceives meaning before text.
