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.
