This essay was first given as a speech to a class of incoming students in May 2025.
Your university has no idea what to do about AI, and they have no plan. They have a fake plan about getting a plan. That’s it. On their plan, they don’t know what will happen with your life. So, you’re in charge now. Actually, you always were.
You must know what you want, if you are to be successful in university today. Ask yourself, what are the fundamental capabilities that you want for yourself? What are you unwilling to outsource or delegate? AI and robotics will make it possible to outsource almost everything.
When I was in grade school, I did not feel compelled to do complex math in my head. I’ve never felt that it could be important because I knew there would be calculators and spreadsheets available to me my entire life. Now we all know there will be AI and robots. And so now you know (or you should know) that you won’t need to speak in complete sentences, you won’t need to think clearly, and you won’t need to be able to decompose complex intuitions into actionable plans.
You should also know that if you do not learn to think clearly and completely, then someone else will finish your thoughts for you. And that is a dangerous thing.
Perhaps in the very near future, we will be able to live our entire lives with the education of a school child and be just okay. For me, that isn’t rewarding. I pursued a university education because I wanted to change myself – in my most vigorous studies, I changed my understanding of the world and every day after those changes, I saw the world differently, experienced more deeply, with more wonder and with sharper questions across domains that I didn’t even know existed before I went to university. You don’t need a PhD to do this, but it will require immense practice and dedication to be athletically able in the realm of the mind. If a Neanderthal saw us today, we would appear to be (slightly odd) gods. The entire gap between what a Neanderthal believed tens of thousands of years ago, and what a modern university graduate believes – all of the rudimentary and complex-but-wrongheaded ideas that we very slowly replaced with (mostly) much better ideas – all of that can be learned by a person within a few short years.
Being educated changes your perception of the world. A person who has taken on the hard work of thinking for themself, especially an educated person who thinks for themself, sees the world differently than a person who does not think for themself.
Humans are not the best memory machines – that ended with the advent of writing. Humans are poised to not be ’the best’ at computation as well.
It seems possible that in the very near future the skill of thinking may well be dispensable to basic economic success. But you cannot delegate your ability to think any more than you can delegate your health.
So you must choose for yourself whether you want to be an educated person or not, and whether you want to practice thinking – and with an independent point of view. If you do, then AI will be the most powerful aid in that effort humans have ever created. Thus, some will become like gods. Some will choose not to learn or think but merely to coast.
Learning to think is like learning a language. You can have other people or computers translate many languages for you. In most cases you should want computers to translate languages for you – after all, if you are limiting your enquiries to sources written in just one language, then you misunderstand your opportunity and impoverish your thinking. But knowing a language yourself is another matter – with a select number of languages you can gain real competence, but there is no way around the annoyance of getting your meaty brain slowly to learn the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of that language. That is especially true if it is your native language.
Your teachers are not going to help you – they are mostly unprepared for this. They don’t know what to do – in backroom meetings they are panicking, speculating, and in the stupidest of cases, scheming to keep you from using AI. You need to make your own decision for your own well-being and existence: you need to know for yourself and act for yourself.
I currently see only 3 acceptable pathways for a university student today:
Work against higher standards. You must 10x or 100x whatever your course requirements are. You must do work to imagine what this means. It must not be possible to complete any course without deep and daily dependence on AI. If you are to read a book and write a paper, you should, for example assume it requires citations of 400-500 books in many languages, and draws inferences across a broad range of time and disciplines, in many languages – and you should cross check all of this against sources to ensure accuracy.
Learn faster and more deeply. You must dialogue obsessively with AI to make sure your ideas are ‘robust under language’ – that you deeply understand the concepts and can explain them in several orthogonal ways, with many analogies and examples. You must, with respect to any idea, be able to think through it from first principles.
Think on your own. You should sit down and record – even write with pen and paper if you must – and see what you can actually do yourself. Then submit it to AI and discover how you can improve. And repeat.
You must not delay this decision – do not believe that later you will have the opportunity to learn how to think (you won’t), whereas right now you must get grades in order to get the right job. Wrong. Your mind will not be more capable later than it is now. You will have less not more time later to gain this skill: you’re a student now, and this is the best it will ever be for learning. This is your moment and opportunity to learn how to think for yourself. If you learn how to think and operate now, you will do well in your career and in your life; those who cheat their way through university now will be the first to be cut in rounds of layoffs at the companies they wanted so badly to gain entrance that they cheated themselves and their teachers in university.
You must not cheat. Do not skate through your classes by lightly warming over your AI-generated assignments. Do not accept the assignments unless they are (1), (2), or (3). Not because it is immoral but because you are cheating yourself – and you will be a Neanderthal in a world of gods.