A Small Diwali Gift: I’m offering a special discount on my books until 15th Nov. 2026. If you’ve been meaning to pick up a copy for yourself or gift one to someone you care about, this may be a good time. Explore the Diwali book offer.I was recently driving to a hill resort in the Konkan region of Maharashtra with my family.We were somewhere in the middle of nowhere when Google Maps started behaving a bit strangely. The route it suggested was around 30 km shorter than the one we were intending to take earlier.I doubted it, and so stopped at a petrol pump to ask for directions. The pump attendant confidently suggested a route.I thanked him, got back into the car, and did what any sensible, modern, technologically empowered human being would do.I ignored him.After all, what could a man who may have lived in that area for a few years know that a satellite orbiting thousands of kilometres above the Earth didn’t?So, I trusted Google Maps.And Google Maps, perhaps offended by my earlier doubts, decided to take its revenge.Within half an hour, we were driving on roads that seemed to have given up being roads. There were big potholes, long stretches of broken tarmac, and eventually a narrow route through a forest where we didn’t see another vehicle for quite some time.At one point, I wasn’t entirely sure whether we were still following a road or had accidentally entered someone’s idea of a trekking trail.And then, of course, the GPS stopped being useful altogether.We were lost.It took considerable effort, some anxious moments, and help from people we encountered along the way to find our way back.I don’t remember exactly how much time we lost that day. But I remember one thing clearly.A man at a petrol pump had told me how to reach my destination. I had chosen to trust a malfunctioning machine instead.Looking back, I realise how ridiculous my decision was. But it also revealed something about how easily we surrender our judgment to technology.I was reminded of that experience while reading a thoughtful essay by Melanie Challenger recently, which was about how our growing dependence on technology can gradually weaken abilities we once exercised regularly.She titled her essay Deskilling the Body. Her core idea was that when technology repeatedly performs a task for us, we may lose the opportunity, and eventually some of the ability, to perform that task ourselves.Challenger refers to a study that followed 13 GPS users over three years. The researchers found an association between greater GPS use and a steeper decline in spatial memory (which allows us to record, store, and recover information about the layout of our environment and the locations of objects) over time.The study was small and so I wouldn’t draw big conclusions from it. But I think the underlying possibility is worth thinking about.When you try to find your way without using GPS, you tend to pay attention to key landmarks and turns, and continually work out where you are. But when you delegate that work to a blue line (often yellow and red in Mumbai) on a screen, while you may reach your destination more efficiently, you don’t really develop the ability to find your way there independently.And this isn’t limited to navigation.Remember how you learned something before every answer was available on a screen?You may have visited libraries, searched through books, asked questions, and sometimes spent days trying to understand something that today would take a few seconds to look up.I did all of that in my younger days. But I wouldn’t romanticise those days. I wasted plenty of time doing things that technology now does much better.But I wonder whether I gained something from those inconveniences that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time.When I struggled with a difficult book, I learned to follow an argument. When I couldn’t find an answer immediately, I had to think harder on the question, wrestle with it in my mind, and sometimes discover an answer of my own.The effort wasn’t always separate from the learning. In fact, the effort was often the learning.And this brings me to investing.When I started working as an equity analyst in 2003, researching a company was a slow process.I had to read a company’s annual reports and its competitors’ annual reports to understand how the business made money.I made detailed notes and Excel models and went back and forth between different pieces of information, sometimes spending hours on questions that led nowhere.Only I know how tedious that work was. But then there was also something important that happened along the way.I began noticing things.I noticed a management team that repeatedly promised more than it delivered. I noticed a company whose profits grew but whose cash flows didn’t. I noticed a business that looked attractive until I understood how much capital it needed to keep growing.And I also learned how little I had known all along.Sometimes, after several days of research, I realised that I still didn’t understand the business well enough to form an opinion.I think that, too, was valuable.Today, an AI tool can perform in minutes many of the research tasks that once took an analyst or investor days or weeks. And I find this remarkable. I use AI myself, and I can see how much time it saves.But there’s a question we should be asking alongside our excitement about these capabilities:When technology does the thinking for us, what happens to our ability to think?In her essay, Challenger also writes about a study on AI-assisted writing, which found that people who passively copied AI-generated writing reported less confidence in their ability to perform the task independently than those who first produced their own drafts and then used AI to revise them.I have been a writer for more than 15 years now. And I understand that writing isn’t merely a way of presenting thoughts we’ve already formed. Writing is often how we discover what we think.This reminds me of a story about the noted physicist Richard Feynman.A historian once visited his office to interview him. When he saw Feynman’s notebooks, he said how delighted he was to see such “wonderful records of Feynman’s thinking.” “No, no!” Feynman protested. “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.” “Well,” the historian said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper.”What I take from Feynman’s response is that writing isn’t merely a record of our thinking. It is often the very process through which our thinking develops.But when a machine produces the finished result, we may receive something polished without going through the process that would have helped us develop our own understanding of the subject.I think something similar can happen in investing.Consider a simple thought experiment. There are two investors studying the same company. One spends many days reading about the business, understanding its economics, examining management’s decisions, and developing a valuation. The other uses an AI tool to generate a detailed analysis, complete with financial projections, competitive advantages, risks, and an estimate of intrinsic value.Both arrive at the same conclusion. The stock appears undervalued, and so both invest.A year later, the stock falls 40%. Now what?The first investor can return to the assumptions behind the original decision. He knows which questions he struggled with, which risks he considered, and where his understanding remains incomplete.The second investor has the same information available, perhaps even more. But does he possess the same understanding? He might. But the summary alone doesn’t tell us whether he could evaluate the thesis when circumstances change, and that matters a lot.Of course, even the first investor could be wrong. Spending more time on research doesn’t guarantee better judgment. Sometimes, it merely makes us more attached to our conclusions.But it’s important to draw a distinction here.Having an answer is not the same as having developed the ability to arrive at that answer.And investing, perhaps more than many other activities, tests that distinction.It’s relatively easy to agree with a convincing investment thesis when markets are calm. But it’s much harder to examine that thesis independently when the stock is falling, everyone around you is worried, and your own money is disappearing.That’s when borrowed conviction can become fragile.Challenger makes an important distinction between technologies that strengthen our abilities and those that repeatedly replace the activities through which those abilities develop.I think that’s a useful way to approach AI in investing.There’s no virtue in doing manually what a machine can do accurately in seconds. Calculating financial ratios by hand won’t necessarily make someone a better investor. But you must differentiate between work that merely consumes your time and work that develops your judgment.Many of us use AI for research every day, and I do too. I agree that summaries are useful. But my point is that when a summary replaces the reading itself, we may miss the very process that helps develop our judgment.So, let AI collect information, organise financial data, compare documents, and identify inconsistencies. But please write your own investment thesis before asking AI to challenge it. Read the annual report before asking for its summary. And please also attempt a simple valuation yourself before comparing it with a machine-generated estimate.Also, perhaps occasionally, try to resist the temptation to ask for an immediate answer and spend some time thinking through a difficult question.This isn’t a warning against technology. Instead, it’s a reminder that your ability to think independently is too valuable to surrender without noticing.I sometimes wonder if the greatest risk of intelligent technology is that we become so used to good answers that we lose the habit of asking good questions.I think that would be a serious loss.A Small Diwali Gift: I’m offering a special discount on my books until 15 November 2026. If you’ve been meaning to pick up a copy for yourself or gift one to someone you care about, this may be a good time. Explore the Diwali book offer.References and further readingDeskilling the Body by Melanie ChallengerHabitual Use of GPS Negatively Impacts Spatial Memory During Self-Guided Navigation by Louisa Dahmani and Véronique D. BohbotHow to Take Smart Notes by Sönke AhrensThe post Deskilling the Investor’s Mind appeared first on Safal Niveshak.