AI will replace you, and it’s your fault. Since GPT’s release in late 2022, students have been increasingly leveraging AI to complete their schoolwork, with The College Board reporting 84% of students admit to using it to complete schoolwork in their recent study. Students recognize AI as a fast, reliable tool that produces work difficult to distinguish from a real person’s with minimal alteration. So difficult, in fact, that the previous sentence itself was written by AI. Teachers are divided on whether or not AI accelerates the development or deterioration of education, and ultimately students’ futures.
As new technology has developed throughout the past century, schools have always needed to adapt. Math teachers worried about calculators; English teachers worried about spell-check. Yet the result was never detrimental to students’ learning: math became more abstract, and English focused more on the content of writing. The difference is that students always had to complete their work, until recently.
Now there are students who haven’t done homework since the day AI became mainstream. Many people believe that the minority of students who don’t use AI to keep up will be at a disadvantage to those who do. While AI may alleviate the workload of those who use it, it comes at a cost.
Researchers at MIT found that students who consistently completed their work using AI endured permanent damage in numerous cognitive areas, such as memory recall, language and critical thinking skills, which extend far beyond a scholastic setting.
Many students in support of AI argue that, just like calculators and spellcheck, it will be a tool available in the future to use. However, these students fail to understand the distinction between use and abuse. Once their employers find out they entirely rely on AI to do their jobs, AI will continue to do their job without them. If AI does their entire job, what are they even being paid for? Using AI for everything doesn’t make people more successful; it makes them more replaceable. It’s only when people learn to do the tasks themselves and exercise their critical thinking that they can perform better than AI. And if no one can perform the job better, then human attention should be directed elsewhere where it can be more effectively utilized.
The same pattern of technology reallocating jobs has happened in the manufacturing industry. Once autonomous machinery became cheaper than employees, the demand for workers declined. In order to adapt, the market favored higher-level white-collar jobs like engineering to develop said machinery.
That’s not to say that ignoring AI will protect your job. There will be jobs that AI can do more efficiently than people. It’s the chronic use of it that indicates whether your position is at risk and your attention must be reallocated. Now that AI can perform complex cognitive tasks without human constraints, the only thing left to do is think creatively for ourselves. AI can only do what it’s been trained on. It can only do what’s already been done. You need to problem-solve by thinking new thoughts. That’s how you become valuable in a future with AI.
To understand the edge humanity has over AI, you must first understand what it does, what we do, and what makes it different from other technology. AI doesn’t think in the way people do. It’s a sophisticated matrix of values and weights; a mathematical function with an input, an output, and lots in between. Math is objective: One plus one equals two. Every input must give the same output, and that’s what makes it useful. AI is the mathematical attempt at subjectivity, but human originality can do better.
Both the objective and subjective are important tools; humans explain the gaps that they can’t yet predict to achieve a thorough understanding of the world around us. can see how AI makes it difficult to differentiate between the two. At what point can people no longer say AI doesn’t think? After all, thoughts are just electrical signals in our brains, which are theoretically mathematically predictable: a runaway recursion we call free thought.
Now, I want you to stop and think. Think for yourself. How are you going to be valuable to society? Why do you deserve your future job over AI? Especially if AI already does it for you.
Abusing AI doesn’t give you an edge; it replaces you. It degrades you. It strips you of what makes you human. So keep using it for every assignment, every mildly adverse task, every time you don’t want to think, because you will forget how to do so yourself. AI has unleashed many unanswered questions, making the future a lot harder to see. But if there’s one thing it has made clear, it’s that being human is not a right but a privilege, and the moment you think your last true thought is the moment you lose your humanity.
