Learning in the AI Era

Everyone’s racing to get better at prompt engineering this semester. There’s a quieter skill underneath it, one nobody’s named yet: knowing whether you should be asking AI at all. Before your next request, ask yourself first — what would you miss out on learning if it just gave you the answer?

In 1857, Florence Nightingale came home from a war with boxes of numbers nobody asked her to organize. She taught herself statistics, invented a new kind of chart, and changed British government policy. Nobody assigned her that work. Today, AI can hand you fast answers. The harder question: will you still decide what’s worth asking?

Educational technology experts are already telling us exactly how AI is going to change the relationship between you and your professors. Elsewhere, I spoke about what that means for colleges. Here, I want to talk about what this means for you.

Calculators would ruin math, spell-check would ruin writing, search engines would ruin memory. Now AI. Underneath: fear that leaning on something outside yourself stops you from standing alone.

You feel faster with AI beside you, and for a while that feels like proof you’re learning. New research says otherwise: the speed is real, but nobody finds out what actually stuck until the tool disappears.