Technology has become extraordinarily good at reducing the time between a question and an answer.
And most of the time, we celebrate that reduction.
Why spend twenty minutes finding something if I can know it in twenty seconds?
There are many situations where this is unquestionably better. If I need an emergency number, I want it immediately. If I need a simple fact to complete a task, there may be little value in making the retrieval process difficult.
But I've started to wonder whether we are using the same measure—speed—for kinds of knowledge that serve very different purposes.
Some information only needs to be retrieved.
Some needs to be understood.
And some needs to become part of us.
I notice this distinction when I read.
I still struggle to read deeply from an e-book or a screen. When something really matters to me, I tend to reach for a physical book. I sometimes even print academic papers that I could easily read digitally.
For me, reading physically creates a kind of context that is difficult to describe.
I remember where something appeared on a page. I remember turning backward to connect it with an earlier idea. I remember writing something in the margin. The physical location and interaction somehow become part of my memory of the idea.
This doesn't mean physical books are inherently better than e-books. Other people may have developed completely different ways of reading deeply on digital devices.
What interests me is what this difference reveals.
Sometimes the things technology removes as friction were also helping us think.
Turning pages is friction.
Searching through several sections is friction.
Reading an argument before reaching its conclusion is friction.
Trying to recall something before looking it up is friction.
Some of that friction is unnecessary. But some of it forces us to compare, remember, connect, and reconstruct.
From the perspective of efficiency, they can look exactly the same.
AI makes this distinction even more important.
With AI, we can increasingly skip not only the process of finding information, but also part of the process of organizing it. We can ask a question and receive a concise explanation, already synthesized and structured for us.
That is enormously useful.
But after receiving it, I think there is another question worth asking:
What do I need this knowledge for?
If I only need it for the next five minutes, perhaps retrieval is enough.
If I need to make a decision with it, I probably need to understand its assumptions and context.
And if I expect to rely on it under pressure, explain it without assistance, connect it with other knowledge, or apply it in an unfamiliar situation, then perhaps getting the answer is only the beginning.
I need to spend time with it.
I need to struggle with it a little.
I need to explain it in my own words, test whether I actually understand it, forget parts of it, return to it, and connect it with things I already know.
Eventually, the information becomes less like something I can access and more like something I can use.
Maybe this is one of the skills we need to develop as information becomes increasingly abundant:
not simply learning faster, but deciding what deserves to be learned slowly.
We don't need to internalize everything. That would defeat much of the value technology gives us.
But we also shouldn't outsource everything simply because retrieval has become effortless.
The challenge is learning to distinguish between information we need to access, knowledge we need to understand, and knowledge we need to own.
AI can make the first almost instantaneous.
It can help enormously with the second and third as well.
But for those, perhaps our goal shouldn't always be to eliminate the journey.
Sometimes the journey is exactly what turns an answer into knowledge.
So as AI makes more and more information instantly available to us, perhaps the question is no longer simply:
“How quickly can I get the information I need?”
Instead, I want to leave you with a different question:
What knowledge in your life is worth slowing down for—not simply so you can access it when you need it, but so that it truly becomes part of how you think, decide, and act?