AI Won’t Kill Jobs, Our Refusal to Think Will
Michael Ashley – Back in 2015, I started coaching high school students to write their college essays.
Immediately I noticed a problem. It wasn’t just the fact that so many young people struggled with writing. No, the real challenge was that so many couldn’t think of anything to write about: ideation itself was their challenge.
We can easily pinpoint many underlying causes of the problem:
♦ Decline of reading societally
♦ Rise of screen-based technologies like phones and tablets
♦ Lack of academic rigor, combined with grade inflation
But I want to address something more foundational: our educational system itself. Our current public schooling model primarily came from Horace Mann. And Mann based his ideas on what he saw in Prussia.
As the researcher Eric Knaus explains:
America adopted elements of the Prussian education model in the 19th century amidst rising immigration, urbanization, and efforts to instill social unity. Rooted in its origins after Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia in 1806, the system structured schooling to produce obedient citizens through nationalized, compulsory education.
Designed to stratify students into leaders or industrious workers, it emphasized conformity and rote learning, prioritizing compliance over creativity. This highly controlled and hierarchical system resonated with U.S. elites aiming to maintain social order during industrial expansion and the Prussian influence on American education remains an influential framework in modern education system.
Reading this quote reminds me of the late great comedian George Carlin who explained how our education works in this insightful rant:
There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, ever be fixed. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.
That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting f***** by a system that threw them overboard 30 f****** years ago. They don’t want that!
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork.
Once we realize our educational model came from Prussia and was designed to do just what Carlin suggests, it’s no wonder all those students couldn’t generate a topic to write about for their college essay. They were indoctrinated for years to follow orders, not think critically or creatively.
But guess what?
In 2025, we don’t need obedient workers. Not anymore.
Automation can do most of the grunt work that was once prized in Corporate America. Even knowledge work, once lauded as the key to prosperity is being gobbled up by the AI leviathan.
It’s reached the point that Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei “now warns AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs,” according to Fortune.
That’s a big problem. But not for the usual reasons people think.
At the precise moment AI is vacuuming up jobs like a Kirby on steroids, our young people aren’t investing in their own brains. Instead of reading the classics, writing essays, learning calculus, and discovering how to think through philosophy, they are outsourcing their minds to the machine—at their own peril.
Look, I get it.
I was 15 once. I wanted to blow off school to do more fun things like hang with my friends. If something like ChatGPT had existed back then, I might’ve been tempted to use it to cheat too.
But the fact is that if young people choose AI shortcuts they will be the ones that suffer. I came to this realization in part due to my recent interview with Luca Csathy, a freshly minted graduate from NYU’s film program.
What he said floored me: ALL his peers now use AI to write their papers. If that weren’t bad enough, even professors are now cheating with AI, using it to not just write their syllabi but even to grade their students’ papers—and write emails to students to explain their grades.
It’s easy to shrug off these concerns of as behind-the-times. “So what? Everyone’s using AI now. What does it matter?” you may push back.
It matters because (mental) laziness disguised as progress is what supercharged the problem Mann catalyzed. 20 years ago, “progressive” educators told us it was okay to let our kids choose phones over books. “With all the world’s knowledge at their fingertips, they’ll educate themselves,” they told us. “They’ll become autodidacts.”
Nothing close to that happened.
Instead, all those 15-year-olds spent their time scrolling, texting, sexting, binge-watching—instead of investing in their own intellectual growth.
By the time they were ready to write all those college essays demonstrating what they learned to the college boards, they had nothing to write about. They didn’t even know where to start.
But now the problem promises to worsen if we stay on our current trajectory. Not only does the younger generation have even more content to distract them from learning, but they also have AI at the ready to do their thinking for them.
Unfortunately, the marketplace no longer rewards college grads with jobs coming out of school. If Amodei is correct, all those expensive diplomas will mean little to employers eager to downsize their way to greater profitability.
That’s not a knock against big business. That’s capitalism.
But there is a way out: young people need to become counter-cultural rebels again just like they were in the 1960s. Only this time, their revolution is not without, it’s within. They need to change themselves, not the system.
And it all starts with a new learning mentality: invest in yourself, not as the next obedient worker seeking W2 employment, but as a well-read critical thinker capable of paving their own economic path, whatever that may be.
That’s the best way to make yourself indispensable—no matter what happens next.
SF Source The AI Philosopher Sep 2025