As people rely more and more on technology to solve problems, the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate.

It is clear that technology has changed our lives, and it will ever after and our dependence on it will increase, as suggested in the prompt. Whether our ability to think for ourselves will diminish is, however, up to the success of artificial intelligent (abbreviated as A.I. so on) replacing human brain. The degree of technological advance where A.I. can completely substitute human beings’ thinking is called singular point. If that point is achieved, people’s mental ability will surely degenerate.

The fields once regarded as original domains of human beings are now being conquered by A.I. slowly but irreversibly. When Deep Blue, an A.I. devised to play chess, beats the Russian grand master, people still had hope: Although it’s calculation speed for the reasonable number of cases in the game overwhelms that of humans, we have intuitions that cannot be installed in computer. This was followed by the belief that when the number of possible strategies is more than the number of every single molecules in the universe, --- so it is not possible to find the best choice for a given time---well-trained human beings’ insights will not be defeated by computers. Unfortunately, a recent series of victories of AlphaGo, the top-notch A.I. against the champions of Go, known as a representative game that requires intuitions, debunked this belief.

Just like other parts of human body, brain deteriorates if we do not use it regularly with minimal intensity. Suppose A.I.s evolve further and make every decision instead of people after some point in the future. We may rely on A.I. in business, legal, medical and agricultural areas. People may even manage relationships with others echoing the proper expressions suggested by A.I. We will not produce artworks suffering from ever-lasting pains as creators anymore. Rather, we would enjoy paintings, sculptures, and music ‘created’ by mighty A.I. This seemingly Utopia accompanies the withering of human beings’ mental ability over every area. We already have experienced prototype of this deterioration. Recall that we used to memorize the phone numbers of our friends, family, and colleagues in 1980 and 1990s. Now no more than two or three digits of the phone numbers of our closest friends remains in our mind. If this phenomenon gets serious, our brain will never be able to function as we do nowadays.

For luck of some people who hate to face such situation, it is not clear whether singular point which results in these mental degenerations comes in the end. Though the speed of improvements in A.I. is remarkable, at least for now the technology has a clear limit. The replacement of humans’ mind with A.I. requires a necessary condition; it should pass a test called Turing test. In this test, A.I. is said to have been developed enough to replace one-to-one human relationships if people cannot discern between the chatting with another human being and an A.I. The test is thought as the first stage toward singular point, but clearing this test is found to be incredibly difficult even with the most recent technologies. Therefore, it is hard to determine whether the technology will eventually arrive at singular point. If it turns out that A.I. will end up with being the mere assistant of humans, people cannot help but exercise their brains making and solving new problems on their own.

The probability of mental deterioration is heavily dependent upon the possibility of the rise of singular point. If it happens, it would be highly likely that our descendants will experience the degeneration of their ability to think for themselves. On the other hand, if we are the last resort of problem solving, new problems will always tease us and train our mental abilities. Therefore, the prediction relating technology and humans’ mental ability is hardly a simple problem. The most likely answer would be, therefore, that it depends.