This is a misalignment problem. The economic signal (the diploma) still circulates as if the underlying work has occurred. But the work isn’t there. We’ve just shifted the friction offscreen, and have outsourced it to a chatbot and let the system pretend nothing’s changed. So at this moment, we are credentialing fluency with tools that do the thinking for you.
And yes, cheating has always existed. But this isn’t traditional cheating. It’s ambient, platform-approved, investor-funded cognitive offloading.
And to be abundantly clear, this isn’t the fault of the students – in a winner-takes-all economy, it must be extraordinarily difficult to resist the allure of something like an AI homework machine. But there are questions like: if AI can do the work for you, what exactly are we measuring? What do you do with the free time… scroll TikTok (that answer seems to be yes). And what happens to the labor market when a four-year degree signals nothing about what a person can actually do?
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We are seeing this happen in pockets. Take a look at what Mississippi has accomplished with education – it has the fastest improving school system in the entire country. These are minor currents against the major flow of capital and attention.
But they suggest an alternative to both digital frictionlessness and physical collapse – a world where effort is neither eliminated nor wasted, but directed toward systems that actually sustain us. Maybe it’s things like requiring tech platforms to internalize costs they currently externalize to physical systems and human attention (challenging) or educational models that reward deep engagement rather than interface management (also challenging). But we have to acknowledge that when we remove friction from one domain, we’re not eliminating it, we’re just moving it somewhere new.
