India, July 24 -- A child today can produce a confident answer to almost any question before they have formed a single thought of their own. That is the quiet danger we have walked into. For every generation before this one, learning demanded friction - we searched, we compared, we decided what to trust, and somewhere in that struggle the habit of thinking was built. Remove the friction, and we risk raising a generation that can retrieve everything and reason about nothing.

But this is not a story of despair, and we should refuse to tell it as one. The most useful frame I have encountered comes from Harvard, where educators describe what they call Hybrid Intelligence - AI not as an oracle to be obeyed, but as a thinking partner to be que...