I Would Have Taken the Shortcut
My hand is halfway to the keyboard before my conscience gets its trousers on.
Give me a paper due at midnight, a machine that can finish it by eleven, and the prospect of being left alone afterward. I know which way I would lean. I am not proud of this. I am also not going to dress myself up as the one honest bastard in a room full of tired people.
I have wanted work finished more often than I have wanted it done properly. Usually there was somebody waiting for it who seemed to feel the same way.
So when students start handing their thinking to a chatbot, I recognize the impulse before I condemn the result. The recognition makes the result worse.
An MIT committee’s August report warns about what it calls “cognitive surrender”: falling back on AI at the first sign of difficulty. Students told the committee the temptation was strongest when a deadline looked ready to beat them. The report describes early signals that overreliance can weaken memory, critical thinking, confidence, and mastery. Early signals, not a medical certificate declaring an entire generation brain-dead. The distinction matters, even if it ruins a perfectly good opportunity to shout at the young.
But I keep imagining my younger self sitting across from me, listening to this sermon. He has heard enough sermons to recognize the part where the speaker exempts himself.
“You never cut a corner?” he asks.
“Constantly.”
“Then what the hell do you want?”
I want him to have something left when the assignment is gone. That sounds feeble said aloud. He wants to go to bed. I want to explain the difference between getting through the night and getting through an education, and already I sound like somebody whose nights are paid for.
It is easy to praise difficult learning when you are not the one trying to fit it between a shift, a commute, another class, and the elaborate performance of being all right. I don’t know how many of these students are carrying that particular load. I know that telling an exhausted person to appreciate the struggle is a good way to deserve a chair thrown at you.
Some struggle teaches nothing. A badly written assignment does not become sacred because it takes six hours. A teacher can waste your time. A machine can explain something patiently when a human explanation has failed. I am glad those possibilities exist. I would have needed them.
The trouble begins when the relief from difficulty becomes relief from ever finding out what I cannot do.
When I don’t understand a paragraph, I have a small, specific problem. I can reread it, argue with it, ask somebody. When a machine hands me a smooth explanation and I mistake its ease for my understanding, I may stop noticing the problem at all. I leave with the confidence, though I still couldn’t explain the thing without looking down.
“Fine,” says the young bastard across from me. “How do they grade it?”
They want the answer submitted. They want it clear, correct, on time. The years of practice are supposed to make me capable of producing that answer, but the submitted thing is what gets inspected. Now I can produce it without those years. I have satisfied the visible demand and missed the reason for it.
I don’t think students invented this confusion. I think they have spent their lives being rewarded for understanding it.
Adults ask about marks before they ask what caught a kid’s attention. Employers ask for credentials. A bad first attempt arrives looking like a liability. Then we sell a device that can conceal the bad first attempt and act disgusted when somebody buys it.
I would have bought it. I might have bought the better subscription.
That is the admission I cannot get comfortable with. I would have experienced the purchase as a little freedom. Less embarrassment. A night back. Maybe enough time to see someone I liked. I would not have felt myself surrendering anything. Surrender is supposed to make a noise. This would have felt like finally catching up.
The MIT committee has an uglier detail than the lazy-student story. Some instructors were considering using AI research assistants instead of hiring undergraduates. Considering, not a count of students already thrown out. But the possibility is enough to make the younger man stop listening to my lecture.
They are telling him to endure being a beginner while wondering whether they still need beginners around. A novice needs explanations. A novice gets something wrong and occupies the afternoon of somebody who could have worked faster alone.
If the purpose is only to get the research done, I can see why a machine looks attractive. If the purpose includes teaching a person to become a researcher, his inconvenient presence is rather the fucking point.
The committee says so, more politely. It argues for protecting those research opportunities. It also records students’ resentment when instructors use AI for lectures or feedback while restricting students’ use. The report is not a warrant to smash every laptop. It wants different rules for different kinds of learning.
“The teacher gets to save time. Why don’t I?” asks my imaginary younger self.
“He already knows the subject.”
“Then where do I learn it? Not in his lab, apparently.”
I cannot answer him with a speech about character. Not honestly. Character does not get him a place in a lab. Being virtuous in private will not make somebody else pay for the hours during which he is clumsy and needs help.
And yet I cannot tell him the shortcut is harmless. He is the one who will someday have to decide whether an answer makes sense. He deserves more than a degree and a practiced expression for when somebody asks him to explain himself.
I imagine him starting to tell me which part of the work he couldn’t follow. He gets halfway through a sentence and stops. I nearly finish it for him.
It has been about ten seconds. Already I want him to notice how patient I am.
Primary report: MIT Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training, August 13, 2026
Source: MIT Report Finds That AI Is Leading to “Cognitive Surrender” Among Students