AI will make us dumber, because it will act as a prosthesis for human intelligence causing natural intelligence to atrophy. As an analogy, say you had biotic pants that allow you to run faster and farther then you can naturally. As long as you wear these biotic pants, you can pretend to be the worlds fastest human. This illusion flatters the ego and can be addictive in terms of self esteem.

But since these pants do all the work, your natural legs will atrophy and get weaker and your natural stride will get awkward. Without the pants, you will get slower. There will be a certain dependency on the pants to avoid having to face this hard reality. One will start to live in an alternate reality where skinny weak legs with bionic pants is the new athletic.

If you look at cell phones today, people are forgetting how to deal with day to day reality as an individual. Instead many need to constantly call, text or internet search for advice or approval. In a sense, the social network has data and knowledge advantages, but the individual without this cell phone prosthesis has lost its natural ability to cope as an individual. It is similar to a drug or alcohol addiction. When buzzed the person feels more like themselves, but when sober there is a feeling something is not there. This is why tech is so easy to sell.

Years back it was common for married couples to go on long drives for vacation. If they got lost the stereotypical wife will want to stop and ask for directions. The stereotypical husband would prefer drive around and find his own way. Today with cells phones, most cars only have wives, since very few men still have the skills to improvise without asking the GPS for direction. Many male brains have lost the ability to self visualize directions. The GPS does such a good job, that nobody seems to notice this going away until the network goes down.

As technology and AI improves and reaches more and more aspects of life, the increasing dependency will dumb us down in more and more ways. Human and technology will meet but at a level that is less than full human potential. The dependency affect will then allow the AI to appear to exceed the dumb down version of humans; unconsciousness.