In November 2022, an alien landed, spawned and went mainstream. These writing calculators excelled at tasks like summarizing text, creating generic sub-routines for coders, generating media and enhancing computer vision. The narrative “if you don’t adopt your competitors will leave you behind” was pushed by big tech. The productivity paradox pinnacled when AI agents began executing specific tasks on their own. Industry leaders pressured management to adopt without thinking critically about the implications, what would be gained from it and more importantly what would be lost?
Three types of people emerged in society: those who used AI to augment themselves who would inherit the earth, those who got dumber as they outsourced everything to AI and those who had no access who ended up being the luckiest of the lot.
Because as LLM’s ate the world they also began eating our brains. The were a filter through which everything passed, every document emailed or online chat would be hoovered up allowing for mass centralization and surveillance. We began outsourcing our thinking slowly at first and then accelerated by the big push.
Students wrote fantastic essays and reports, all which sounded the same. Teachers graded these same reports by first running them through the filter resulting in an echo chamber, real creativity became diluted as we adapted the content and writing structures manufactured by AI.
We stopped reading from the source resulting in a lack of understanding of the key concepts within subject areas and a decrease in content knowledge. We forgot how to make meaning through reflection and without a foundational grasp of the concepts and their inter-relationships, we lacked understanding of concepts that needed to be applied to think critically.
Moreso young people who lacked conceptual knowledge and work experience, were unable to use AI effectively as they could not compare the output to a best practice example because they had not done it previously from scratch on their own before. Instead they blindly followed AI outputs without critically questioning them. Older workers too were quietly deskilled and became dependent on AI as they practiced their skills less weakening their thinking and doing muscles.
Learners had forgotten that writing had been a way to structure their thoughts clearly and make the implicit explicit. The arguments formed by writing essays trained our critical thinking muscles. Without training, these muscles wore down. Research studies began emerging showing a reduction in cognitive effort, less active learning and a resultant decline in critical thinking (Kosmyna et al., 2025). As AI reduced the incentives for learning, the well of collective human knowledge and innovation dried up and the global economy entered a knowledge collapse (Acemoglu et al., 2026).
Excessive screen time caused a lack of social connection, increased anxiety and reduced mental health. Teachers and students were led away from the core principles of what had been working in education. And somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to discover our values and unleash the human spirit through learning. In the process we lost the heartbeat of our humanity.
Looking back the proliferation of AI should not be seen as an apocalyptic event for learning. Rather it should be framed as a watershed moment, an opportunity to re-examine the learning value chain historically and see which components need more attention. The old education system excelled at building out and assessing content knowledge while ignoring the improvement of the actual internal processes that occur when learning. This factory system promoted transactional learning to the test and churned out graduates to get a good job in line with market needs.
In response to the AI tsunami a learning enlightenment dawned. A new way of perceiving learning as a philosophy for living was created. Learning was disassociated from the classroom and was seen as an approach to life that could be practiced in every moment. We invested in our biological intelligence, our unique human skills to connect with one another and ability to manipulate the physical world.
We rediscovered Socratic social learning to promote debate and critical thinking, used observation and reflection as everyday research tools to learn from the natural environment and applied what we learnt by converting ideas into matter by making stuff through real-world projects.
Examining how we learnt enhanced our ability to gather content knowledge, extract learning from experiences to generate new knowledge, think critically, build solutions to problems and share what we found with others.
How can you use this insight to unleash your full human potential? You are the book, you are the university. The answer lies within you.
