The ultimate game of fetch

We are living in the era of distraction.

Television became binge-watching. News became an endless stream of alerts. Social media became an infinite scroll. Video games became immersive worlds engineered to keep us inside them for hours. Each arrival fractured our attention a little further, and we adjusted without much complaint.

Now, artificial intelligence has entered the picture, and it is worth being precise about what it changes. The technologies before it competed for our attention. AI competes for something more intimate. It offers to do our thinking.

A question pops into our head. Instead of sitting with it, we ask AI.

Fetch.

Need to write an email?

Fetch.

Need a summary of a book?

Fetch.

The answer arrives instantly, and we move on.

Now, fetch is not the problem. I look things up all day. When I need a fact, a date, or a first draft of a routine email, handing that off is not a loss — there was never any thinking worth protecting in it. The dog only looks foolish when it fetches a ball nobody threw.

The danger is the reflex. It is reaching for the answer before we have done any thinking at all — outsourcing not the busywork, but the part that was actually ours to do. Forming a judgment. Working out what we believe. Sitting in the discomfort of a problem long enough for something to connect. That kind of thinking has always required effort: concentration, patience, and a fair amount of frustration. Great ideas rarely arrive on demand. They come from wrestling.

AI removes that friction beautifully. And friction, it turns out, is not always the enemy. Sometimes it is the work. I did not arrive at this through theory. I arrived at it through illness.

After contracting COVID, I dealt with brain fog. If you have lived it, you know. My thoughts moved through mud. Tasks that once felt automatic took real effort, and my mind simply did not feel as sharp as it had.

For a long time I assumed the fix would come from technology — another app, another system, another tool. Instead, I found relief in something almost embarrassingly simple. A pen and paper.

I began writing by hand. I outlined ideas on paper instead of typing them. I made lists, sketched plans, slowed down enough to engage with my own thinking instead of merely capturing it. And the more I wrote, the clearer my head became. I was not recording information. I was processing it. My brain was doing the organizing, not the screen.

Now, I want to be honest about what that does and does not prove. One man’s recovery from a virus is not evidence that AI rots the mind. It proved something narrower, and to me more useful: that thinking is an activity, not a possession. When I stopped doing it, I felt the loss. When I started again, it came back.

The skeptic has a fair reply here, and it deserves an answer. Humans have offloaded mental work for centuries. Socrates warned that writing would destroy memory. A generation of teachers swore calculators would kill arithmetic. They were partly right and mostly wrong, because we used the room those tools created to think about harder things.

So the question is not whether we offload. We always have. The question is what we hand off. Offload the arithmetic and you free yourself for the math. Offload the judgment, the deciding, the figuring-out, and you have not freed yourself for anything. You have simply stopped.

I am not anti-technology. I own a technology company, I use AI every day, and I believe it will be one of the most transformative tools we ever build. I am telling you this precisely because I sell it: a tool is supposed to extend its owner, not replace him. A good one makes you more capable. A misused one makes you dependent, and dependence is a poor thing to feel sharp about.

The real value of an education was never the facts. It was learning how to think — and the process of reaching an answer is often worth more than the answer. AI can be a genuine partner in that process. It can research, organize, and brainstorm alongside you. The trouble begins only when it does the part that was supposed to change you.

So here is the modest experiment I would offer. The next time a question arrives, do not fetch right away. Sit with it for a minute. Reach for a notebook before the browser. See what your own mind does with it first, then bring in the tool.

In an age of instant answers, the people worth listening to will be the ones who still know how to arrive at their own.

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Deryck Burnett is the owner of Megabite Services in Fernandina Beach, where his team has been helping Nassau County residents and businesses with technology for nearly two decades. For questions or comments, visit Megabite.