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The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn’t cheating – it’s the erosion of learning itself
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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In modern society it seems like our ideal use of technology is to insulate us from the natural world and get rid of the everyday tasks we have to do. If it adds to comfort and convenience, it's generally successful.
But I think this is bad for our health. When you think about our hunter-gatherer ancestors, those are people who evolved to walk around the forest all day constantly being busy. We don't necessarily need the same sunshine, fresh air, exercise, and full range of sensory inputs in order to have fulfilling lives. But I bet that stuff is a huge help for the vast majority of us. Our privilege as modern humans is that we can pick and choose what we spend our time on, in the form of hobbies.
Removing the process of learning is like the meta, higher-level version of removing the day-to-day work from our lives.
So if AI ever gets that good to where we are fine not learning shit and trusting in the quadrillion-dollar black box, I hope that means we end up in the post-scarcity Star Trek future or else I fear it will only get worse from here.
Maybe we'll all just go back to hanging out and playing games and music together. Ancestral hunter gatherers worked only a fraction of the hours we do.
Yeah, that's a good point. They did a lot more work on their own needs, their surroundings, and their family/tribe. They did zero work grinding away at some mind-numbing task to make somebody else rich.
Also, most modern hunter gatherer groups lived lifestyles that a lot of early western anthropologists derided as 'lazy'. But they were actually practicing a highly evolved skill set attuned to their environment.
The thing about gathering is that the land has a fixed sustainable population level. With farming, you can get more food by working a bit harder. But with hunting/gathering, the land supports what the land will support. Over hunting today just leaves less game to hunt tomorrow. And if the plants and animals you're acquiring are spread thin enough, then leaving camp to gather them can actually be net calorie negative. Spend all day hunting a single mouse, and you'll burn more calories doing that than you'll get by eating it.
Over the millennia, by natural selection, early humans evolved cultural practices that forced them to live sustainably. Those groups with cultures that stripped the land bare all died of hunger.
So cultures evolved to have a lot of down time. Sitting around a fire telling jokes and stories isn't "productive," but it also doesn't burn many calories. Humans are highly productive hunters and foragers. If we work too hard at it, we strip the land and die of hunger. It's the same reason lions spend most of their time sleeping. The go-getter lions that want to max the grind all die of hunger.
So instead hunter gatherers would tend to grow their numbers to up near the carrying capacity of the land and then use a lot downtime to keep from overhunting and overforaging. Western anthropologists saw this as being lazy, but they were applying concepts of labor that only made sense in agarian and industrial societies.