I spent years learning things I can now ask a machine to do in seconds.
And honestly, I don’t quite know how to feel about that.
Like many of us, I grew up with a simple promise: study, develop your skills, become good at something. That will get you a good job. A good job will pay well. And that will give you a better life.
I believed it. I built my life around it.
Every difficult concept I finally understood, every mistake I learned from, every evening spent getting better at my craft felt like an investment. I wasn’t just learning how to do something. I was building a future in which I would have something valuable to offer.
Now I’m watching parts of that work become accessible to people who never had to go through the same process.
I don’t resent them for it. I use these tools too. That’s what makes this so strange: I can be genuinely excited about what AI lets me do and still feel a sense of loss over what it makes less valuable.
What do years of learning mean when the result can increasingly be produced without them?
Of course, getting an output isn’t the same as understanding it. Expertise still matters. So does knowing when an answer is wrong. But I struggle to find reassurance in the things AI cannot do yet. I don’t know how much of that boundary will remain in ten years.
That’s why I worry the next 10–15 years could bring something I’d call mass intellectual decline.
Not because people suddenly become less intelligent, but because they stop seeing a reason to make the effort.
Why spend years developing a skill when you expect it to lose its value before you’ve even mastered it? How many people will keep choosing the difficult path of understanding when an acceptable answer is always one prompt away?
I already feel that doubt in myself. That’s the part that scares me most.
Education has to change radically. “Learn this so someone will hire you” cannot be the only reason we give people to develop their minds.
I still believe learning matters. But the promise that once made that belief feel obvious is breaking.
What do we replace it with?