The Cognitive Surrender and The Wilfrid Laurier Test That Universities Should Fear

In a deeply unsettling interview published today by the Portuguese newspaper Público, Arnold Pears, Professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, identifies one of the defining paradoxes of our time: a machine that knows almost everything may help create a generation that understands almost nothing. Generative AI gives children what Pears calls “a false sense of competence”, the illusion that obtaining an answer is equivalent to understanding the problem. A calculator assists with an operation that the student must still identify; a large language model can erase the entire intellectual journey between question and answer. 

The deeper indictment, however, is directed at an educational system that has spent decades rewarding the final product while pretending that it faithfully represents the process that created it. Generative AI has now shattered that convenient fiction: the answer can be flawless even when the intellectual journey has disappeared entirely. Prohibiting AI would be futile, but normalising intellectual surrender would be catastrophic. As I have argued on 18 August here, AI should serve as intellectual scaffolding, elevating human thought while cultivating stronger and more independent minds. Pears’s warning reveals how easily that promise can be inverted, the technology intended to liberate intelligence may instead liberate us from the effort of becoming intelligent. As i have argued, every cognitive technology should therefore face one unforgiving test: after years of using it, are people more capable without it—or less? If the answer is less, we have not democratised intelligence. We have automated intellectual dependence.

Universities are already approaching the same precipice. Pears describes journal submissions doubling or tripling while peer-review and grant-evaluation systems struggle towards collapse. Academia risks becoming a vast factory in which machines write papers that their nominal authors barely understand, for reviewers who have no time to read them, merely to satisfy indicators in which almost nobody still believes. The great cognitive surrender will not arrive through machines violently seizing control of human thought; it will arrive quietly, welcomed as convenience, productivity and progress. If we use AI to think further, it may become one of history’s greatest instruments of intellectual liberation. If we use it so that we no longer need to think, it will become the machinery of our intellectual abdication. We may ultimately succeed in creating machines of astonishing competence while calmly accepting the progressive dismantling of our own.

PS - The warning is no longer theoretical. In a preprint published on 20 August 2026, Kaltchenko and Tiwana, from the Department of Computer Science and Physics at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, tested three personalised Qiskit homework assignments across 150 separate ChatGPT sessions. All final submissions executed successfully and passed their graders. Personalised tasks, hidden references, compulsory reflections and executable notebooks, all intended to demand genuine student engagement failed to protect the intellectual core of the exercise. ChatGPT reproduced every outward sign of competence without establishing that the student possessed it. If universities continue to assess polished products rather than observable reasoning, cognitive surrender will not announce itself through failure. It will arrive as impeccable submissions, excellent grades and hollow degrees.

Trump e o mistério da desaparecida coluna vertebral do submisso semanário Expresso

 

No passado dia 4 de setembro, a Assembleia-Geral das Nações Unidas aprovou, por 164 votos contra um voto velhaco, uma resolução que recomenda a adoção da projeção Equal Earth, muito mais fiel à verdadeira dimensão dos continentes. Essa medida pretende corrigir a distorção associada à projecção Mercator que não só diminuiu como humilhou África e outras regiões do Sul no imaginário de biliões de pessoas durante centenas de anos. O único voto contra veio dos EUA pois para Trump e para a sua matilha, até o simples acto de devolver a África à sua verdadeira dimensão constitui uma perigosa "agenda ideológica".

Os números retiram qualquer disfarce à velhaca objecção dos EUA, na projecção Equal Earth, a África é, cerca de 3,1 vezes maior do que os EUA, enquanto na velha e deformadora projecção Mercator parecia apenas 1,5 vezes maior. Mas a fúria de Trump tem uma segunda e ainda mais sórdida explicação, a sua demente obsessão em apoderar-se da Gronelândia. A projecção Mercator oferecia-lhe a mentira reconfortante de uma ilha quase tão grande como África, transformando uma cobiça colonial no sonho de uma conquista continental. A agora aprovada projecção Equal Earth destrói-lhe a farsa, o grandioso troféu imperial cobiçado por Trump possui, afinal, apenas um catorze avos da área de África.

Porém, o semanário Expresso, que nunca perde uma oportunidade para proclamar solenemente a sua independência, parece ter concluído que os votos de 164 países continuam a não ser suficientes para alterar um mapa sem a indispensável autorização do referido criminoso. Assim, logo no primeiro caderno de hoje, serviu obedientemente aos seus leitores a velha representação deformada do mundo que a Administração Trump prefere, não vá sua excelência o senhor embaixador norte-americano em Lisboa interpretar a mudança cartográfica como um perigosíssimo ato de insubordinação, apresentar uma queixa e fazer com que os jornalistas do Expresso acabem proibidos de viajar para os States. 

PS - Na verdade o mapa mais revelador do primeiro caderno do semanário Expresso não é o do planeta Terra, mas o da coluna vertebral do referido semanário, tão mirrada por reverência ao nojento Trump que nem a deformadora projecção Mercator conseguiria inchá-la.

The Greatest Appropriation of Unpublished Scientific Knowledge in Human History

For nearly a century, one of mathematics’ most formidable questions defied the world’s greatest minds. An army of AI agents may have solved it in less than four days. OpenAI deployed around 10,000 autonomous agents, powered by an internal model not yet available to the public, which produced a solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem in just 88 hours. They exchanged 2.7 million messages and generated approximately 130 billion output tokens; formalising and verifying the proof in Lean required only another 17 hours. Although Lean can certify every step of the formal proof, mathematicians must still confirm that the statement encoded in the system corresponds exactly to the original problem. If they do, this will not merely be the most important proof ever produced by AI: it will mark the moment when machines entered the highest realm of mathematical discovery. https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-has-solved-one-of-maths-1-million-millennium-prize-problems-20260908/

The achievement is, however, surrounded by a profoundly disturbing dispute. OpenAI acknowledges that it launched the operation after hearing rumours that two Millennium Prize Problems had been solved, rumours subsequently linked to the still-unpublished work of Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge. According to Buckmaster, they had used OpenAI models and placed all their project drafts in Codex sessions. OpenAI states that neither its researchers nor its agents specifically accessed this work, but admits that it cannot rule out the possibility that de-identified data derived from their use of its products helped improve the models. Both groups also relied heavily on the mathematical programme previously developed by Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, further complicating the attribution of priority and scientific credit.

This episode extends far beyond mathematics. The same company that provides scientists with research tools also owns the models, computing infrastructure and financial resources required to transform itself almost instantly into their competitor. Once it becomes aware of a promising opportunity, it can mobilise thousands of agents and spend several million dollars, resources beyond the reach of any academic research team. Even if no improper access occurred, the asymmetry of power has become impossible to ignore.

This episode gives disturbing concrete form to the civilizational choice at the heart of my manifesto, Civilizational Futures. AI can serve as “intellectual scaffolding”, liberating intelligence and accelerating discovery; but when a handful of corporations controls the models, computing infrastructure and armies of autonomous agents—while receiving scientists’ unpublished work—it acquires the power not merely to assist science, but to appropriate it. The Navier–Stokes episode may therefore be both a triumph of machine-augmented reason and a warning that humanity’s greatest instrument for distributing intellectual power could become its most formidable mechanism for concentrating it.

In this emerging order, the scientist supplies the question, the drafts, the corrections and perhaps even the decisive insight; the platform absorbs the value, unleashes an army of agents and emerges claiming the breakthrough. The question is therefore no longer whether AI can conduct science. It is whether scientists are paying to train the very machines and enrich the very corporations, that may strip them of priority, authorship and control over their own discoveries. Until enforceable safeguards exist, entering unpublished research into a commercial AI system should be treated for what it may become, a transfer of scientific power from its creator to a vastly more powerful corporate rival.

PS -  That warning has now been corroborated from inside the AI industry itself. Jacob Coxon, who has just resigned from Anthropic after a stint at OpenAI, explicitly cited the Navier–Stokes breakthrough while accusing both companies of racing towards self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.” Evan Hubinger, a current lead in Anthropic’s alignment division, said Coxon was right—and conceded that the company still has no plan for aligning superintelligence. When the builders themselves speak this way, leaving such power in private corporate hands can no longer be defended as innovation policy. It becomes the civilizational gamble at the heart of Civilizational Futures: whether AI liberates human intelligence or concentrates unprecedented power in a handful of corporations answerable to no one.