The dentist’s office had a fish tank. One of those sad rectangular jobs with neon gravel and a plastic castle, the kind of setup that makes you wonder if the fish know they’re in prison or if ignorance is part of the deal. I was sitting there with a cracked molar and a magazine from 2019, watching a blue tang go back and forth, back and forth, same four inches of water, and I thought about education.
Not because I’m an educated man. I’m not. I dropped out because the chairs were hard and the teachers were soft and nobody could tell me why I needed to diagram a sentence when I could feel a sentence, in my spine, when it was right. Bukowski dropped out too. So did Fante. So did half the writers who ever mattered. We educated ourselves the expensive way — by living wrong and reading everything.
But I’ll tell you something. When I was sorting mail at the post office, brain-dead at three in the morning, I was still thinking. The job didn’t ask me to think but I couldn’t stop. That’s what a human brain does when you leave it alone. It chews. It wanders. It makes connections that don’t make sense until they do. You stand there feeding letters into slots and suddenly you understand something about Dostoevsky that no professor ever explained, because your body is bored and your mind is free.
Now there are professors — real ones, tenured, the kind of people who gave their lives to the idea that thinking matters — saying out loud that their students can’t think anymore.
Not won’t. Can’t.
A literature professor at Berkeley is having existential conversations with her class. Not about the books. About what’s happening to their brains. “What is it doing to us as a species?” she asks, and I want to buy that woman a drink because it’s the first honest question that institution has been forced to hear in thirty years.
Carnegie Mellon did a study. Knowledge workers who trusted AI tools were losing their critical thinking skills. Not declining. Losing. Like a muscle you stop using. Like the ability to read a map after you’ve had GPS for five years. MIT strapped EEGs to people’s heads and watched their brains go dim when they wrote with ChatGPT. The lowest levels of cognitive engagement. They weren’t writing. They were supervising. Sitting in the passenger seat and pretending to drive.
A professor at Ohio State — guy named Clune, a novelist, someone who knows what it costs to put real words on a page — says his students are now “incapable of reading and analyzing, synthesizing data, all kinds of skills.” And what does Ohio State do? Requires every student, every major, to take “AI fluency” courses. Because when your house is on fire, the smart move is obviously to hand everyone a can of gasoline and call it preparation.
Here’s where it gets ugly. The tech companies aren’t just building these tools. They’re giving them away. OpenAI poured millions into teachers’ unions. Microsoft is in the schools. Duke University built its own version — “DukeGPT,” because nothing says academic integrity like naming your shortcut after the institution. Elon Musk partnered with El Salvador to give Grok to a million public school kids, which is the kind of sentence I’d have thought was satire five years ago but we live in the timeline where satire retired early and moved to Portugal.
A professor at Penn State called it what it is: they’re trying to addict a generation.
That’s the drug dealer model. The first hit’s free. Get them young, get them dependent, and by the time they realize what they’ve lost, they won’t have the cognitive capacity to articulate the problem. That’s not conspiracy. That’s business strategy. Philip Morris did it with candy cigarettes. Social media did it with likes. Now AI does it with the illusion of competence.
I never went to college. I taught myself in libraries and bars and on the night shift, reading paperbacks with broken spines while the fluorescent lights buzzed and the clock moved like it was being paid by the hour. It was inefficient. It was painful. It was the only education that ever stuck.
Because here’s what the machines can’t replicate: the struggle. The three hours you spend on a paragraph that ends up in the trash. The book you read six times before it opens up and shows you what it actually means. The essay you write badly, then less badly, then finally — after your brain has been wrung out like a bar rag — something true lands on the page that you couldn’t have predicted or programmed or prompted.
That process is thinking. You can’t skip it and arrive at the same place. It’s like saying you can get fit by watching someone else do push-ups.
Some of the professors are fighting back. Oral exams. Handwritten notebooks. Making students show pictures of their notes. It sounds desperate and maybe it is. It sounds like building a levee out of sandbags while the river laughs. But those professors — the ones pulling out index cards and fountain pens — those are the last people standing between a generation of human minds and a future where nobody remembers how to disagree with a confident answer.
The Berkeley professor said something else. She said her Gen Z students are starting to notice. Starting to push back. Starting to see themselves as guinea pigs in a giant social experiment.
Guinea pigs.
I looked at the fish in the tank. Still going back and forth. Same four inches. Same plastic castle. The fish doesn’t know it’s in a box. That’s the whole trick.
But guinea pigs — guinea pigs are smarter than fish. Guinea pigs bite.
Source: Professors Say AI Is Destroying Their Students’ Ability to Think