What Does It Mean to Be “Smart” When the Machines Are Smarter?

Artificial intelligence has raced so far ahead that simply knowing things no longer feels impressive.

Photo by Growtika on Unsplash

In the 1990s a pocket calculator felt like magic. Today your phone can diagnose skin cancer, translate a sentence into dozens of languages, and write a passable love poem before you finish your coffee. Artificial intelligence has raced so far ahead that simply knowing things no longer feels impressive. So where does that leave us as humans? What counts as smart in a world where answers are cheap and instant?

Knowledge Is No Longer the Bottleneck

A century ago “an educated person” was someone who could recite facts, parse Latin, and perhaps recall every British monarch in order. The industrial age prized specialists who stored expertise in their own heads. Now GPT‑style models draw on terabytes of writing, medical images, legal briefs, and even code. They surface whatever snippets we request in fluent prose within seconds.

That shift forces an uncomfortable realisation: if the robots can out‑memorise us, then raw recall cannot be the main criterion for intelligence. Yet we still hear parents, teachers, and employers praise pupils for having “a good memory” as though it were 1950. It is time to update our mental model.

Five Human Edges in an AI World

Through my own work with students and start‑ups, and by watching the research coming from cognitive science and organisational psychology, I see five qualities that still mark genuine human smartness.

• Curiosity and Question Crafting
  We once measured cleverness by the answers a person could produce. Today we measure it by the questions they dare to ask. Curiosity drives someone to notice gaps, puzzle over contradictions, and reframe problems in fresh ways. Language models can shower you with explanations, but selecting the right prompt is a profoundly human art.

• Critical Judgement
  AI can hallucinate, cherry‑pick, and inherit hidden biases from its training data. The smart human knows how to test claims against evidence, look for conflict of interest, and weigh whether to trust or override a model. In short, we supply epistemic guard rails.

• Creative Synthesis
  Combining ideas from geology with urban design, or jazz with climate activism, seldom emerges from brute‑force prediction. It relies on lived experience, metaphors, humour, and that half‑conscious sense of pattern that sparks when you are walking the dog. Creativity is the alloy that bonds disparate facts into something novel and meaningful.

• Social and Emotional Intelligence
  Teams succeed not through perfect information but through shared purpose, empathy, and subtle persuasion. AI can suggest talking points; only a human can read a colleague’s discomfort in a meeting and shift the plan to keep everyone on board.

• Ethical and Civic Reasoning
  Tools do not possess values. They follow instructions, whether noble or harmful. Being smart therefore means widening the lens, asking whose data we use, whose jobs may vanish, and how to mitigate any harm before it scales.

The Rise of Centaur Intelligence

Chess players coined the term centaur for a pairing of human strategy with machine calculation. The same model now applies to marketing campaigns, drug discovery, lesson planning, and investigative journalism. The human sets context, constraints, and taste; the machine offers speed and scope. Smart people excel at designing workflows where each partner does what it does best.

New Literacies We Cannot Ignore

• Prompt Design
  The quality of your input text, tone, constraints, examples, determines the usefulness of the model’s output. This is quickly becoming a twenty‑first‑century literacy on par with academic writing or public speaking.

• Data and Algorithm Literacy
  Knowing how a model was trained, what might cause drift, and which biases lurk inside the training corpus grants you control rather than dependency.

• Reflective Practice
  Schedule moments to disconnect from the tool entirely. Write a paragraph by hand, debate with a colleague, or stare out of the window. Cognitive “white space” stops your own reasoning muscles from atrophying.

Cultivating Smartness Day by Day

1. Feed Breadth, Not Just Depth
   Each week read something far outside your domain. A marine biology article might unlock a metaphor for your next policy paper.

2. Practise Slow Thinking
   Before accepting the first slick answer an AI offers, jot down two rival explanations and ask what evidence would separate them.

3. Run Ethical Premortems
   Imagine that your AI‑assisted project failed spectacularly. What would the headlines say? Work backwards to build safeguards now.

4. Share Your Learning Loops
   Publish your prompt libraries, failures, and lessons learned. Collective wisdom diffuses the power of large language models rather than letting it concentrate behind closed doors.

So…

Being smart in 2025 and beyond is less about internal storage and more about orchestration. It is the ongoing craft of asking perceptive questions, making well‑founded judgements, weaving ideas across domains, navigating human emotions, and anchoring all of it in shared ethical commitments. Think of intelligence not as a personal possession but as an active verb, something you do in partnership with ever‑stronger machines.

So the next time a model dazzles you with instant genius, do not feel diminished. Ask instead: What can I add that the machine cannot? That single question is the essence of smartness in the age of AI.