Before You Disagree - by Oluwaseun Balogun

Before You Disagree The Olodo Syndrome Before you disagree... hear me out. If you survived a Nigerian classroom without being called olodo, please tell us your secret. Some of us were collecting that title every Monday morning before assembly. One wrong answer? "Olodo!" Teacher asks, "Who discovered River Niger?" You confidently stand up and say, "Nigeria." The whole class? "OLODOOOOO!" You don't even know whether to sit down or transfer schools. At this point, being called olodo was practically part of the curriculum. We've always believed an olodo is someone who doesn't know. Simple. Case closed. ...Or is it? Because these days, everybody is saying the same thing. "AI is making this generation stupid." "Nobody thinks anymore." "We're entering the olodo era." And every time I hear that, I keep asking myself one question. Are we really? Let's be honest. This generation can learn almost anything from a phone. Need to fix your laptop? YouTube. Need to understand Economics? AI. Need to write an email your English teacher would frame on the wall? ChatGPT. So if knowledge is literally sitting inside our pockets... How exactly are we becoming more olodo? Then it hit me. Maybe we've been using the word wrongly all along. Maybe an olodo isn't someone who doesn't know. Maybe it's someone who has stopped trying to know. There's a difference. A very big one. Using AI isn't the problem. Using AI instead of your brain is. See, AI should be like that brilliant friend in class. The one you ask for help when you're stuck. Not the one that starts writing your exams while you go and buy puff-puff. Some people don't even argue with AI anymore. ChatGPT says it. Claude agrees. So it must be true. My brother... Since when did we stop asking, "But... is this actually correct?" That's the part that scares me. Not because AI is becoming smarter. But because we're becoming comfortable letting it do all the thinking. There's a Yoruba proverb that says, "Orí bíbí kò ní ogun orí fífo." You don't cure a headache by cutting off your head. So banning AI isn't the solution. Ignoring it isn't the solution either. The solution is teaching people how to use these tools without losing the one thing that made the tools useful in the first place— their minds. So maybe we're not entering the Olodo Era because AI exists. Maybe we'll enter it the day we stop questioning, stop imagining, and stop thinking simply because a machine can do it for us. Now... Before you disagree... Tell me this. When was the last time you disagreed with AI?

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