2025: The Year We Relearn How to Learn With AI
AI is breaking the Overton window on education, and stepping beyond the frame may be humanity’s only hope
Once upon a time, I fell in love with dystopian themes—consoled by the notion that I might never directly experience such a future. I expressed this obsession in a video mashup of George Lucas’ 1971 pre-Star Wars classic THX 1138 with Björk’s “Pleasure Is All Mine” and “Hunter.” The Lucas film is essentially a visual expression of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 novel We, in which the protagonist, a mathematician named D-503, falls in love with I-330. The love affair is in direct opposition to the totalitarian OneState society that punishes creativity and emotion and instead fosters strict logic and reason.
This frigid future scenario is one of the many possibilities I envision when acolytes of the so-called accelerationist movement push for progress within the framework of rigid logic and reason, disregarding the residual impacts because, ultimately, it will be worth the temporary internecine cultural strife. Maybe. Maybe not. What has become clear to me, after speaking with a number of university professors on the Hundred Year Podcast, is that artificial intelligence’s influence on and disruption of education will be a primary component of any such future—dystopian or techno-utopian.
That leather-bound college diploma, neatly framed on countless office walls around the planet, is slowly morphing from a golden ticket into a fading passport to prosperity. Like a polaroid developing in reverse, the crisp edges of academic credentials are blurring in real time as artificial intelligence rewrites the rules of knowledge, skill, and professional advancement.
When James Conant, Harvard’s president from 1933 to 1953, set out to transform his university’s admissions, he believed he was dismantling an aristocracy of birth to create a true meritocracy of talent. As David Brooks masterfully chronicled in “How the Ivy League Broke America” in The Atlantic, Conant's vision was revolutionary: replace the old WASP elite's emphasis on "breeding" and social grace with a new order based purely on intellectual horsepower. The SAT would be his great leveler, IQ his metric of excellence.
Over ninety years later, that meritocratic system faces an existential crisis that would have been unimaginable to Conant. It's not just that AI can ace the standardized tests he helped institutionalize—though that's certainly part of it. The deeper problem is that his entire conception of merit, based primarily on raw intellectual processing power, has become dangerously obsolete.
The AI Revolution Meets Academia
The arrival of AI only accelerates this crisis of purpose in education. When machines can outperform humans at most cognitive tasks, the meritocracy's emphasis on standardized testing and academic achievement becomes not just incomplete but actively counterproductive. ChatGPT can now write papers that would earn A's at Harvard. AI assistants can debug code faster than computer science graduates.
The very skills that universities have historically certified—the ability to research, analyze, and synthesize information—are being rapidly commoditized by AI. The four-year degree, which ostensibly guarantees white-collar employment, is starting to look suspiciously like an expensive time capsule from a pre-AI era.
Similarly, data from LinkedIn indicates that roughly 72% of executives now value soft skills over technical capabilities, a direct repudiation of Conant's technocratic vision. The new university students appear to be less interested in the memorization of facts that can be easily retrieved by AI models and more focused on developing the uniquely human capabilities that AI still struggles to replicate: creativity, emotional intelligence, and ethical reasoning.
The Human Renaissance
While much of this techno-tumult is in play, professors charged with instructing these newly empowered students find themselves in a difficult position: teach the standard curriculum that may become outdated before students exit the academy or figure out how to adapt to the shifting landscape. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky puts it bluntly: "AI's going to make it virtually impossible for a one-off moment of learning [like a degree] to last an entire career.”
Nevertheless, our ability as humans to collaborate and exhibit emotional intelligence through empathy and insight still (for now) puts us in a unique position to utilize AI tools in a way that retains the human touch. Alas, this may be a fleeting moment as AI trudges toward AGI and, subsequently, superintelligence. Things are moving too fast now to attempt to predict the next 50 years; the next five are far more realistic targets for our forward-looking ruminations.
For now, the idea that universities will somehow disappear isn’t just ridiculous; it’s fundamentally unlikely given the massive endowments held by many institutions and incentives by many in government, Wall Street, and even the non-profit sector to keep academia alive—even if it must become a transmogrified version of what we’ve known. The new goal, rather, will likely be to foster more curiosity and bespoke degrees and fields of exploration. And while many have held up STEM as a safe haven that might futureproof one’s fortunes, AI demolishes that and thus requires that even STEM must be somehow modified to integrate a more human-meets-machine concentration that highlights the attributes of the flesh.
The new mission isn’t to decide what degree to earn. Instead, the new path will be to build a portfolio of learning, investigation, and experience. The traditional four-year degree will almost certainly not disappear anytime soon. However, like a fossil preserved in academic amber, it may soon be more valuable as a historical artifact than as a living credential.
The meritocracy of old isn't faltering because it somehow failed to achieve its initial goal; rather, it’s fading because its purpose no longer serves the new reality we find ourselves rapidly being immersed in. Our intellectual Everest is no longer tied to imitating machine reason, logic, and accuracy, we have tools for that now—the new mountain we’ll endeavor to climb is about expressing new insights as we marry our new understanding of a vast array of disciplines, cultivating new human potential in all its messy, unmeasurable glory. The creativity punished in Zamyatin’s imagined world may be exactly the key element that provides the resilience against obsolescence many students, new and old, will be searching for in 2025 and beyond.