July 2026
In fact, that time has already arrived. I remember the film The Matrix—probably the first part—when one of the characters had to get into a helicopter and fly it. Of course, he had no idea how to do it, so he asked headquarters to upload the software for him, and within approximately 30 seconds they uploaded all the information into his brain: how to fly it, every instruction, every experience. And that person knew immediately. He was immediately ready to fly.
W-MOSZCZYNSKI-PPIC-7-2026At the time—about 20 years ago—I thought how wonderful it would be to have such capabilities. To master in 30 seconds something that takes a normal person 10 years. To master a difficult, dangerous profession requiring dozens of examinations and years spent sitting in a library. 30 seconds.
The din of fools
Now one can hear the uniform din of fools saying that humanity is declining. Yes, fools. Because hardly anyone writes anything by hand any more. There were always problems with this, and now free bots on the internet provide unlimited opportunities to write articles, papers, reports and essays. What a wonderful world—people are ceasing to write; artificial robots, much more brilliant and efficient than most people, write for them. The din of fools. Why fools? Because they see only one side of the coin.
After artificial intelligence in the form of chats became widespread, the number of academic papers and articles almost tripled. When reading these works, one can very often encounter characteristic expressions—words that a normal person would never use in such a combination, phrases and constructions that sound as if they came from another planet, plastic, soapy, as if written by a machine spitting out coherent sentences. And indeed—people give a task to a chat, and the chat writes a magnificent essay in beautiful words. In 20 years no one will be able to write a text message, no one will be able to write anything beyond a few words, they will be afraid of making a spelling mistake, they will be afraid to write something that looks clumsy compared with the enormous amount of content produced by artificial intelligence. A world of fools?
Perhaps even this article you are reading now was created by some heavily reprogrammed chatbot taught to write in a crazy, somewhat perverse, perhaps even controversial way. Do not worry—this particular text is being written by a human. He is writing it deliberately to distinguish himself from the rubbery, soapy content now being mass-produced everywhere. And this is precisely the point: to distinguish oneself. Because this content is like food from a vending machine—apparently filling, apparently clean, but without taste and without life.
If this text is written by a human, it will be somewhat controversial. And why is it being created at all? I would like to reverse certain values.
Indeed—soon people will be afraid to enter the kitchen and start cooking without a phone close at hand. Some people are already unable to use public transport without navigation. Since GPS became widespread, few drivers are willing to look for an address in the back streets of an unfamiliar city. Yes, certain abilities are disappearing and this will probably happen. But my neighbour, who used to repair radios himself before he bought a television, also said that real life had ended. And somehow we live on. My neighbour once witnessed the birth of television. People began appearing in black-and-white windows—for free. Once, to see a poet or an actor, you had to go to the theatre. Everything is going to the dogs.
Balance in nature
All right, but everything must always balance out. There is the principle of regression—descending and returning to equilibrium, to balance. The system must balance itself. If only tall people were born in one generation, short people appear in the next. If people with low intellectual abilities appeared in a certain population, they were replaced by people with much higher abilities. Therefore—what follows from this?
Car navigation was such a precursor—popularized approximately 15 years ago, today most drivers drive with GPS. But I can say about myself that my ability to orient myself in space has not disappeared. It is somehow programmed in the DNA. In fact, I have no problems finding an address, and a decade of driving with navigation has created a certain order in my brain, a certain way of thinking about space—and it seems to me that my speed in finding an address without navigation has actually improved. Of course, this is a subjective assessment, not scientific evidence, but I have this feeling and I will leave it here without embarrassment.
So let us return to writing. When we were limited to writing only our own scribbles and the number of sources we could use was limited because there was no internet, papers were naturally of much lower quality. Were we doing any real intellectual work then? Did our writing enrich us? We wallowed in our own soup of overheard information, prejudices and our own ideas. Intellectual inbreeding.
Or perhaps we are enriched more by the fact that something writes for us and we are able to correct it, analyse it and ask questions? Perhaps this is precisely a higher level of intellectual work, not a lower one. I would not join the chorus of pessimists predicting the intellectual decline of civilization. I would rather say that this is some kind of turning point, and that the elements of this turning point which are not yet visible, these new possibilities, will allow us to be more intellectually developed in a decade or two.
Enough with that coal…
Of course—I would not be myself if I did not start looking for analogies in history. The times of coal and prehistory. We had the age of coal and steel. Someone who wanted to learn how a steam locomotive worked and join the initiated had to attend a railway technical school or become a railwayman, or possibly go to a university of technology. Only a select few possessed knowledge about the steam engine. In the case of passenger cars, which appeared in the 1920s, mechanics repaired the first vehicles in home workshops and the knowledge spread a little. Then computers appeared. When I was studying, practically 80% of students knew the construction of a computer and could program. Knowledge no longer for a select few—common knowledge. And quite advanced compared with what our ancestors learned. A grandfather patted a horse on the head and did not know what a transistor was. His grandson understands how a processor, a graphics card and artificial intelligence work…
There is no longer any such thing as excluding older people or people with disabilities from access to knowledge. Everyone has equal access to artificial intelligence, to computers, to programming. Everything is free, everything is at hand. And here we come to the most important thing, the one in the title. The age of intellectual giants is coming.
Access to knowledge has become so excellent, so simple and so fast that it is almost unimaginable. We remember the scene from the beginning of the article—the film character approaches the helicopter and after 30 seconds is able to operate it. We are now reaching such a moment in human history.
I will give an example from my own backyard. I have a fairly heavily wooded garden, full of huge oak trees. The problem with oak trees is that nothing grows beneath them. I took a photograph, sent it to a chat and received a precise mixture of grasses that copes perfectly in such conditions. How long would obtaining this information have taken me just 10 years ago? Dozens of hours in libraries, searching the internet—which, as we know, contains a million pieces of contradictory information—talking to people, watching films. And in fact I still would not have obtained what I needed. I asked several different chats the same question—the answers differed, so I applied the principle of deep research. Each of the chats began producing something like a small master’s thesis on soil conditions, root structure and acidity. For free. After 10 minutes. From various sources. Each cited hundreds of sources from around the world. The knowledge of these artificial entities is now compared to that of a doctoral student—and this is not an exaggeration; I have checked it several times in fields I know.
The same can be done when selecting a used car up to five years old, when looking for the best temperature for baking bread of a particular composition, when diagnosing a strange sound in an engine, or when assessing a tenancy agreement. Every chat has a deep-research system—usually only in paid versions, but even the free ones are sufficient for most applications. What does this mean? It means that within 10 minutes we are able to obtain knowledge whose collection once would have taken us months. Perhaps years. Certainly many, many hours.
I ask five questions
We give the chat a difficult subject. For example, we have noticed that a loaf of bread has small cracks in its crust. We take a photograph. We ask a question. The chat analyses the problem and provides a multi-page, highly complex article drawing on the entire body of human knowledge about this phenomenon. Difficult terms appear. And this is where real learning begins—we take this article and start asking follow-up questions about it. What does the first term mean? What did you mean when you wrote that the amount of pectin in the flour should be increased? Gelling pectin in flour for baking: the horizons shift like the stone, hidden door of a tomb. What does it mean that salt at a temperature of 30°C begins to change the chemical characteristics of protein?
There is a principle used in research called the five-question method—five successive questions are asked about a particular phenomenon, with each question concerning the previous answer. Five or six questions concerning one issue are usually enough to explain a problem completely. Faster than a university lecture, without the need to take notes in a rush and without the risk that the lecturer speaks too quietly, too incomprehensibly, deliberately entangling the subject of the lecture.1
I use this method constantly. What is more, very often the answer, despite many questions, is still enigmatic. Then I ask artificial intelligence to explain it to me using an example, such as ducks or toy blocks. Or I say: present it to me as though I were a completely uninitiated person; explain it as if to a five-year-old. And the chat does it. Patiently. Without sighing, without glancing at the clock, without making me feel that I am asking stupid questions.
Chats are available 24 hours a day. You can ask them an infinite number of questions, and they will always explain everything patiently, with complete determination and in a friendly way. Has humanity ever been in such a situation? For as long as I can remember, reading-room doors were closed to me, I sat for hours in places where half the things were incomprehensible and there was no chance of having them explained because every term required a separate search in a separate book, and this took hours, days, weeks. Now I have the same thing at the snap of my fingers. Determination is enough. The desire is enough.
1 When I was studying, this was a fairly common, one might say fashionable, tendency. A lecture was supposed to be “difficult”.
A motorway to heaven
Within a few months, it is possible to acquire specialist knowledge at a professorial level. I know that this sounds like blasphemy. But I know what I am talking about; I know the abilities and knowledge of many professors and they are not as mythical as they seem to first-year students. In this case, however, we get off a bicycle and board a Pendolino train. We board a rocket that takes us to the heights of specialist knowledge in the blink of an eye. To the level of the stratosphere. It is simply out of this world.
I have the following method for retaining it: I ask a question, receive an answer and copy everything into a Word document. In this way, within an hour I have answers to 20 questions—with my follow-up questions, explanations and stories for children that the chat presented so that I could understand difficult statistical or mathematical issues. With such a document, I upload it to ElevenLabs, which reads it professionally as a radio play. Or I upload it to Google’s NotebookLM, which creates a radio-style programme in the form of a conversation between two people discussing the topic from the document I sent them. You can listen to it in the car, while cleaning, while running. Knowledge then does not take up separate time; it blends into other activities. Everything for free, everything without effort: 30 seconds and I have knowledge.
Recently, I was looking for a new job and had to prepare for several job interviews. I found the company and identified my shortcomings in a specific field—that is, they, those chatbots, grilled me and showed me my sins. Then, within one or two days, I raised my qualifications to levels that once would have required weeks of preparation. Knowledge that I once absorbed over several months at university, I now absorb within two days. This is not boasting; it is a fact that anyone can verify for themselves.
I am so average
I do not have any extraordinary abilities. I am average. The point is that each of us—ordinary people—has a brain that copes best when it is talking to someone. Because human evolution consisted in people living in groups, talking a lot, passing experiences on to one another, listening to stories by the fire. That is how they learned. That is how they acquired knowledge. Now artificial-intelligence chats pass such knowledge on to us. Except that they do it much more deeply, much more confidently. Free of false information because, yes, they hallucinate (the paid ones hardly at all), but less and less often, and this can be checked. Patient, because they can answer indefinitely.
Thus, it depends only on us whether we want to draw from this infinite source of knowledge or avoid it. Knowledge has ceased to be an ordeal. It has ceased to be a boring activity that we had to force ourselves to do.
Slaving over a book—there are no books any more; in a decade they will disappear completely, they are extremely inefficient. Now we can treat it like a television series. Talk for hours about difficult issues, return to them, explore them further, ask about increasingly remote aspects—endlessly.
Chorus of fools
Now you know why I called it a chorus of fools. That din saying that in two decades everyone will be an infantile clicker. Well, perhaps some people will click mindlessly on smartphones. But perhaps some will become intellectual giants who will change the world with their knowledge. Perhaps entire circles, entire communities of people will arise who know very difficult fields of science, who have enormous chemical, mathematical and biological awareness, without the need to sit at university for five years and listen to lectures at eight in the morning when no one is able to think.
The new great entertainment
I already treat learning as entertainment. It brings me enormous pleasure. I can ask follow-up questions, I can be a child who asks an absurd number of questions without embarrassment, I can acquire knowledge for free. Watching television series, politics discussed on the radio, gossip—all of this has become trivial and superficial to me. We become those with whom we associate. If you spend hours talking to an entity that knows everything and explains it patiently, after a year you are a different person. This is not a metaphor.
Therefore, if the great problem is that people have stopped talking to one another and have started talking to artificial intelligence, perhaps this very artificial intelligence will cause the level of people’s knowledge to rise significantly on a mass scale. And if these people have great curiosity about life, a need to explore complicated issues and solve enormous problems, they will become intellectual giants. Such a phenomenon may be widespread.
Just as it was unimaginable to an eighteenth-century person that every ordinary person would be able to read and count and operate complicated devices, so it may be unimaginable to us that every ordinary person will have the knowledge of today’s professor, an expert. And perhaps in 50 years this will be the norm.
The world of intellectual giants is coming. Not everyone. Not always. But those who learn for pleasure will change this world. Artificial intelligence will not do it. People will. People educated by artificial intelligence.
Wojciech Moszczyński
Wojciech Moszczyński—a graduate of the Department of Econometrics and Statistics at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń; a specialist in econometrics, finance, data science and management accounting. He specializes in the optimization of production and logistics processes. He conducts research in the area of the development and application of artificial intelligence. For years, he has been involved in popularizing machine learning and data science in business environments.
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