I Used to Think Technology Would Make People Smarter

The Assumption

I used to think that placing a great tool in someone’s hand would be enough. That they’d instinctively take the first swing of the proverbial hammer. Especially with media and internet technologies—WordPress, Lightroom, things that seem completely unrelated but share a fundamental trait.

Both represent the synthesis of an entire industry, condensed and packaged into a single interface.

And that interface will almost never be intuitive to the average user. Not “average” in terms of ability or some statistical median. I just mean that based on how people generally interact with the tools they’re given—and the consensus of the “industry” on how workflows should work—the fact is that each person will find a unique way to create with these tools. Often a way nobody designed for.

The WordPress Realization

About ten years ago, I opened the real WordPress. Not WordPress.com—the actual website and publishing builder that I’d been familiarizing myself with for nearly fifteen years, some years more intensely than others.

I came to a conclusion: it took me a long time to get comfortable. And the way I used it at certain points wasn’t the “way it was meant to be used.” I kept thinking: wouldn’t it be cool if it could do THIS? Or: why haven’t they built THAT yet?

There’s a thought that comes to mind from the early days of smartphones. You couldn’t use the YouTube app to play music in the background while using another app. Then at some point, Google announces YouTube Premium, which lets you do exactly that.

So go figure. The feature you assumed should exist from day one becomes a paid product years later.

The Nokia Principle

When I was a pre-teen with a Nokia 3310, I knew where every function and every menu lived inside that phone. It wasn’t a large device with a vast number of options, but the ones it had—I immediately knew which I’d use often and which I wouldn’t.

The old phones had tactile feedback from physical buttons. Navigation became sensory memory. Press three buttons in a sequence and you “arrive” at your destination. No thinking required.

Modern UI killed this in a way. Robust tools killed it further. When interfaces flatten and menus multiply, the muscle memory path disappears. Everything looks the same. Nothing feels different.

But if you use shortcuts, if you navigate to the same place inside a tool often enough, it becomes second nature again. The interface fades and the tool becomes an extension of intent.

The Lightroom Pattern

In Lightroom, the same thing happened. When I started my digital creative work, I didn’t use a lot of the functions that were there. They were overkill. But they were there, and I familiarized myself with the tool’s extent—its full surface area.

Most people don’t do this. They find the three functions they need, and the rest might as well not exist. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s how humans interact with complexity: selectively, based on immediate need.

The problem is that the tool was designed with all those functions for a reason. Ignoring them doesn’t make them irrelevant—it just means you’re using a fraction of what you paid for, and you don’t know what you’re missing.

The Amplifier, Not the Teacher

So I always thought technology would make people smarter. But it does and it doesn’t.

Technology amplifies what’s already there.

If you’re the kind of person who navigates toward understanding—who explores menus, tries functions, reads error messages instead of closing them—technology accelerates you. You move at blazing speed. The tool becomes invisible, and the output becomes the focus.

If you’re not that person, technology adds confusion. More menus. More options. More things that could go wrong. You can be stranded in a sea of interfaces for days with no land in sight.

The smartphone didn’t make anyone smarter. It gave fast access to information for people who already knew how to find and use information. For everyone else, it became a distraction device with a good camera.

The Generational Gap

I hope younger people understand this. Digital natives aren’t automatically digital literates. Growing up with technology doesn’t mean understanding it—it means being comfortable around it, which is a different thing entirely.

Being comfortable with a phone doesn’t mean you can troubleshoot why your email isn’t syncing. Being comfortable with social media doesn’t mean you can build a functioning website. Familiarity breeds comfort, not competence.

For older generations, there’s a harder truth. The gap between “I can use this” and “I can’t figure this out” widens with every software update. The interfaces keep changing. The muscle memory keeps breaking. At some point, the cost of re-learning exceeds the perceived benefit, and people stop trying.

Where AI Fits

AI actually improves this dynamic. It reduces the navigation problem. Instead of knowing where a function lives, you describe what you want and the tool figures it out.

This is genuinely powerful for the people who were stranded. Natural language as interface removes the menu problem entirely.

But there’s a concern underneath. If we can’t find our way through a tool ourselves—if we always need an intermediary to translate intent into action—I think that’s not good for how we think in the long run.

The people who understood WordPress deeply didn’t just make better websites. They understood publishing. They understood content structure, metadata, audiences. The tool taught them something about the domain, not just the interface.

If AI abstracts that away completely, we get the output without the understanding. We get the destination without the journey. And the journey is where the learning happened.

The Honest Assessment

Technology is infrastructure, not education. It’s a road, not a driver.

Give someone a great road and they’ll move faster—if they already know how to drive. If they don’t, the road doesn’t help. It might even make things worse, because now they’re moving fast in the wrong direction.

The question was never whether technology would make people smarter. The question was always whether people would use technology to make themselves smarter. And the answer, as with most things, is: some will, most won’t, and that gap will keep widening.

The tool doesn’t swing itself.