Is AI making us Smarter or Dumber?

We feel we are smart enough to use AI tools but it is actually making us dumber and dependent.

Its as per your mindset. If you use it smartly, its making you smarter.

Depends on you what type of person you are and how you intake and use the technology. I feel that AI has opened up so many avenues of technology and possibilities and things will never be the same after it becomes a mainstream part of our society. However, being in academia, I have seen the affect it is having on different young minds. Those who take the easy way out, the easy wrong instead of the hard right, will be negatively effected by AI. They will not know how to do things for themselves and in essence become dependent on the tech. However, there are students that are using AI to do better research, to give them an edge on finding a deeply hidden answers. The students who use AI as a tool to improve their own skills but still can complete them if the tech was not available are the ones who are becoming smarter from it. Those who can envision a new way to look at mathematics or a way to discern thousand year old documents, and use AI to allow them to compute things that may take 10 years and do it in one year. Plus those young people who look at AI and see other applications in other areas of labor. Maybe someone who figures out a way to use AI to enhance construction site safety, or another who finds a way AI can help them make a device that can give a paralyzed person the ability to walk again. So yes to both, and I see it as the same as when personal computers became a mainstream aspect of society. Everyone was scared that kids wouldn't be able to do math anymore or that books would become obsolete, just knee jerk reactionary mindsets. Computers helped us become who we are today and without them life would be totally different, did it make some people dumb and some smart, yeah most definitely, just depends on what the tech was to them, a tool or a crutch.