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There’s a particular kind of person we’ve all come across—affable, well-spoken, maybe even from an excellent school—who seems utterly incapable of doing anything useful without someone smarter behind the curtain pulling the strings.
In the world of fiction, no one embodied the empty suit personality better than Bertie Wooster, the charmingly clueless gentleman created by P. G. Wodehouse, a proud member of the Drones club. Bertie, though technically the protagonist of dozens of short stories and novels, is the butt of the joke and not the brains of the operation. That role belongs to Jeeves, his hyper-competent valet. Jeeves solves problems that Bertie creates. Jeeves remembers everything. Bertie can barely remember where he left his pants. Without Jeeves, Bertie is utterly inept. But he comes in a great package. For a wonderful characterization of Bertie and Jeeves, played by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, check this out.
Wodehouse's genius lay in skewering the idle British aristocracy with lightness and precision. But as I look around at our ever-smarter AI tools, I’ve started to wonder if a modern version of Bertie is reemerging—not in the stately manors of England, but in the digital corridors of our everyday lives.
Remember Ask Jeeves? It was a clunky search engine launched in the ’90s named after Bertie’s legendary butler. The idea was simple: you could ask a question in plain English, and Jeeves, a search algorithm would fetch the answer for you. It was an early attempt at intuitive AI—it wanted to be what we now experience with tools like ChatGPT.
Today, of course, that vision has been superseded a thousand times over. Modern AI can summarize reports, write emails, debug code, schedule meetings, and help you plan a vacation to Kyoto with just the right balance of temples and ramen.
It’s incredible—and a little worrying. Because as these tools become more Jeeves-like in their competence, we risk becoming more Bertie-like in our dependence. At a recent roundtable event, one of the participants mentioned that with the proliferation of GPS use in our cars, nobody knows where they are!
Here’s how I could see it play out. At first, I use AI to save time. Then I start relying on it to do things I could do, but don’t want to. Eventually, I forget how to do them at all. Before I know it, I’m clicking buttons on tools I don’t fully understand, auto-generating documents I haven’t thought through, and outsourcing my judgment to systems trained on the average of everyone else’s output.
I’ve been Bertified!
We may be smart. Educated. Successful even. But like poor Bertie—who attended Eton and Oxford, yet can’t tie his own shoelaces without Jeeves—if we hand over the cognitive heavy lifting to our digital valet, we’re still in charge, technically, but functionally…? We’ve become ornamental and drone-like.
And unlike Bertie, we don’t have Wodehouse around to make our obliviousness entertaining.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t use AI. Far from it. AI is an extraordinary tool—one I use every day. But tools require use, not submission. The danger lies not in delegation, but in disengagement. When we stop thinking critically, stop learning deeply, stop challenging our tools—we start losing the very skills that made us valuable in the first place.
For me, the antidote to Bertification is curiosity and constant learning. Not passive scrolling or endless podcast binges, but active, engaged curiosity. I find refuge in places that still demand real thought and generate wonder. Here are three that work for me:
- Veritasium – for science that surprises and delights me with how the world actually works.
- 3Blue1Brown – for math explained so elegantly it feels like art.
- Acquired – for business deep dives that go far beyond surface-level regurgitation.
These are far more than entertainment. They’re mental resistance training. They remind me that I want to understand, not just output. To make connections, not just summaries. To think in full sentences—not autocomplete suggestions.
Bertie Wooster is lovable. But he’s not a role model.
In the stories, Jeeves always saves the day. In real life, AI might not. A model trained on average human output can’t help you stand out, hallucinations notwithstanding. It can’t teach you judgment. It won’t know your context. And it won’t care whether you understand what you’re doing—as long as you keep clicking.
So yes, let AI be your Jeeves. Let it fetch information, handle menial tasks, and suggest things that spark your thinking. But never let it become your brain. Never let it dull your sense of wonder. Because the moment you stop thinking, stop exploring, stop questioning—that’s the moment you are Bertified.
And we should all be petrified of that.
