Artificial intelligence is making you genuinely stupid

Do the hard thing. There are no shortcuts to excellence. And, a call for the revival of academia.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

— JFK’s address on the nation’s space effort, Rice University, 1962

We need difficulty—for achievement and for orientation. Hard things anchor us. They give shape to time, depth to thought, weight to words. The fire is a rite, not a punishment.

Student as consumer, people as projects

The university becomes a certification factory when students are rebranded as nothing more than consumers of knowledge or institutional strivers. “University” comes from universitas in the Latin phrase universitas magistrorum et scholarium—a community of teachers and scholars—suggesting that a university is a whole, a totality where minds were formed through exposure to the vast and contradictory totality of thought. Now, it is a checkpoint in the logistics chain of career advancement, where the degree matters more than the metamorphosis. The student is no longer a person being transformed by learning, she becomes a project to be managed. A subject has turned into an object. The journey of studying has become a set of OKRs. The graduation has become a box to be checked.

Using AI to “make learning easier” erases the point of learning, which is to enlighten the mind and to make a pupil—a seeing eye—out of a freshman. AI can make it easier to pass tests but it doesn’t do anything about the actual, magical transformation of learning. The AI student is forever a tenant, never an owner, of their curiosity. It’s the Ozempic of learning—it thinks that intaking knowledge is the same as learning, like glueing paper wings onto a caterpillar and calling it a butterfly.

Slow down and struggle

The original purpose of academia was askēsis—discipline, struggle, the voluntary endurance of difficulty for the sake of elevation. The Greek askēsis also gives us “ascetic,” a person who denies easy pleasures in pursuit of a higher life. In the modern university, however, the ascetic has been replaced by the performative multitasker, constantly optimizing, exhausted, and distracted. The student doesn’t read; she highlights. She no longer contemplates; she completes. The degree has become a plastic trophy.

Difficulty is essential because it slows time. It’s a slow-cook approach incompatible with the instantaneous responses of AI. The hard thing cannot be microwaved. It must be dwelled in—and there is a prize in that duration that you can’t get anywhere else: Contemplatio, from which “contemplation” derives, originally meant to be with (con-) the templum, the sacred space. To contemplate something difficult is not to pass over it quickly, but to dwell in its presence, to let it work on you. This is the true aim of education: transformation. Not accumulation.

When we avoid difficulty, we also avoid transformation. Algorithms, despite calling themselves discovery tools, do the exact opposite: curating familiarity and showing you what it knows you want to see. But, growth is always disfiguring. It unmakes as much as it makes. The caterpillar dissolves entirely before it becomes a butterfly. Yet, we demand progress without dissolution, elevation without struggling.

In German, Erfahrung—“experience”—shares its root with Fahrt, a journey. True experience cannot occur without a difficult passage through the unknown. Today, for many, a university degree is not an Erfahrung. It is a credential, a symbol of having gone to a school. Sadly, for many, it confirms identity without changing it. The word “education” has forgotten its origin. From educere—to lead out. Education is meant to draw out the soul, not fill up the résumé. It is meant to be a Platonic ascent, a painful unshackling from the cave of illusion, where one gains vision—it’s no wonder students are called pupils.

Learning is more than just intaking information, and school is more than just a matter of passing or failing. The point of academia is to become. It’s why Santiago, in The Alchemist, finishes his hero’s journey empty-handed: the treasure he looks for is where he had his original dream all along. Likewise, academia is a crucible where people become something new. The purpose of learning is to acquire some kind of knowledge or skill, but also, to build character. I take Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry very seriously: in the end, all schools aim to be a kind of magical, cloistered, otherworldly place where those who enter become more. They gain powers and spells to change the world. They learn how to communicate, they even learn how to learn. They experience loyalty and friendship, and they practice romance and chivalry. They study how to become a person.

Resisting smoothness

In Saving Beauty, Byung-Chul Han warns us about the smoothening of the world. From Jeff Koon’s sculptures to the iPhone to Brazilian waxing, everything has become sans serif. While design is just a visible sign of this vapidness, we see it in psychology, politics, and lifestyle marketing as well: All abnormalities are diagnosed as this or that, people are either trad or woke, and the poster child of health consists of cold plunges, infrared saunas, and acai bowls. Nuance is dead. Smoothness—the lack of friction, texture, and variation—makes us slip and fall into one extreme or the other.

The university, if it is to be more than a certification factory, must recover this ethos: the task of a university is to serve the student by shaping the student—to lead her out of herself, into a larger, more luminous world. University should make you feel like a small fish in a big pond, again and again and again. The sculptor shouldn’t fear the resistance of marble; she relies on it. The student should not fear the resistance of thought; she should press into it.

We need difficulty. The hard thing is a temple—a place where one must remove their shoes, bow their head, and proceed slowly.

We do not need more degrees for the sake of having degrees. We need to choose to go to the Moon because it is hard. People are like diamonds—each with the potential to be brilliant but left ordinary if not cut properly. Artificial intelligence is making you genuinely stupid, not because it shortens your attention span or whatever, but because it’s not letting the rigor of learning carve into you the facets you need to shine.

In a world that seeks to eliminate all roughness, all difficulty, try harder. Reclaim education from utility. Reclaim time from acceleration. The hard thing is the real thing. And in choosing it, you choose—finally and consciously—to become human.

Truly,

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