Raise the Ceiling, Beware the Floor

During March of 2026, the Williams Record was inundated with a flurry of vitriolic, near-identical op-eds covering the topic of AI in the classroom and our society. I did not feel I had anything new to add to the AI debate, but rather I saw it as a symptom of a much broader, older dilemma that has plagued pedagogy for decades: the debate about how much we should allow automation to replace our learning. So I wrote an article about it and published it to the Williams Record, which is what follows below.

Recently our campus has been drowning in a deluge of articles concerning what I consider to be one ancient issue in pedagogy: automation, namely how much of it there should be and what it should replace. This is a debate going back thousands of years; Socrates was opposed to the introduction of writing because he thought that it would automate away the process of remembering things. In our times we face different yet no less radical circumstances, as automation now has the ability to do much more complex tasks at very high levels of abstraction with minimal human involvement.

In particular I am concerned about the enormous dependence many are forming with automation. As it grows in power, scope, and abstraction, many seem to be willing to embrace any technological means to eliminate perceived busywork without stopping to consider what they are losing. I speak not in regard to any particular technology, but rather about the overall trend in the tech world towards selling you increasingly easy ways to outsource entire categories of problems, supposedly to let you accomplish more, to raise the ceiling on what you can do.

I believe this is precisely the opposite of what it is doing. How often do you stop and consider how the technology that you’re using actually works? How often do you seriously consider the alternative of doing some of these tasks yourself? In many cases you never will, instead allowing the tool to replace the act of learning something you would have done yourself. This is the downward sloped floor: a situation where you could have learned something, and because you chose not to, automation has robbed you of a better understanding of what you’re actually doing and instead trapped you at its capability level.

None of this is to imply that we should stop using automation; instead, it is to force us to consider that this is a tradeoff we cannot work around and thus we should be careful when to use automation. In all circumstances, we should keep in mind: what are we losing when we use this technology? Would using it lose a skill we care about, trapping us at automation’s current level, or would it allow us to reach an even higher ceiling, beyond where either automation or human alone could go?

So keep that in mind the next time you feel the urge to reach for some tool to do something for you: is it raising my ceiling, or is it trapping me to the downward sloping floor?