this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2026
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I'm sympathetic to the use of generative AIs insofar as I want society to advance to something very close to Federation society in Star Trek.
Three or four centuries from now, humanity has faced several brutal wars and has come together finally to establish a utopia. The society is moneyless and classless, and the state as much as it exists is a mechanism for mutual aid to other aligned planets. I won't go into too much lore but this is allowed because the matter replicator eliminates scarcity; almost any material good including food can be created out of essentially nothing.
What that means for society is that, as a member of the Federation, you can do literally anything you want with your life. Want to study art and become a sculptor? Excellent, you don't need to pay rent or buy food so you can do that to your heart's content. You don't even need to be good at it. Want to be a farmer on a vineyard in France and make excellent wine? Great. Want to be a farmer on a vineyard that grows grapes to make raisins? Again, you do you. Run a Cajun restaurant in New Orleans if you want; you don't have to buy ingredients and your customers don't have to pay, so the only people that do anything are the people who actually want to be there.
Back to the real world. Almost everyone in university is there because they need a job to receive money in order to pay for the things they need to survive, and the job requirements say "this degree is required". Plenty of people become engineers, for example, because they know the pay will be good, not because they have an intrinsic desire to be engineers. Plenty of people who get engineering degrees stay in engineering roles they hate (or who would do other things if the pay was as good) for the same reason, even though plenty of engineering jobs might only require 2% of what was learned during the course of the degree, if that. The degree is a bureaucratic requirement for survival in a capitalist system and not an actual measure of ability, skill, or desire. That same capitalist system will discard them the minute they stop being useful. This doesn't exactly breed contentment and a willingness to contribute to the greater good of humanity like we see in Star Trek.
Using AI to pass these arbitrary requirements needed to exist in an arbitrary society I find to be understandable. If we want people to go to school for the sake of learning, to better themselves as human beings, that would be a different situation altogether, but that is no where near the system we have actually set up.
I understand what you're saying, but I think this still represents a very cynical view of education.
Think about it this way: in times past, if we wanted to eat an elk, we had to chase it down and catch it. We had to learn to be good hunters as a prerequisite to living comfortable lives.
Today, we have scant few hunters. We might call this a good thing. We no longer need to be hunters to be comfortable, our quality of life has improved vastly. I would naturally agree with this.
However, another consequence is that we can now live very sedentary lives. Food is no longer an incentive to exercise, which means that, as a society, our physical health may actually be worse. And not only that, physical exercise is connected to mental health, too. A lack of exercise can mean that people are more anxious, more frustrated, more cranky, etc.
There are some people who still exercise today, aware that they need it, but for a lot of people, most of them even, the carrot leading them is gone and so they see no reason to bother. It's irritating to bother, actually. I fear the same thing happening to education.
The future Star Trek world that you're looking for requires that people be self-interested in their own development, and motivated enough to follow through on it. And a lot of people would be. But I don't know if a society would be.
Missing the carrot, a lot of people might be content to just remain stupid their entire lives.
So what I'm saying is, getting a degree for a job may or may not be arbitrary, but getting an education, even a forced one, for your society is not. Not as much, anyway.
I'll put forward one other thing. Racists have a harder time devloping in mixed communities. Living around the would-be subjects of ire, seeing what they're actually like, makes it harder for their stupid, racist mythology to take hold. But imagine that somebody said they wanted to live separately anyway, that they didn't care about this arbitrary, interracial education, and that we as a society had to, for some reason, respect this about them.
I obviously don't care about imposing on racists an education that would make them less racist. I think it's important, even.
I also sympathize with the world as it is being unfair to students. But, I don't respect the subversion of learning itself.
I will admit to having a cynical view of education, and of modern society in general. But I do hope for it to improve, which is why I like Star Trek so much. I don't really see anyone tackling the root problems of modern education as essentially a tool for capitalists to generate laborers, though, which is why I'm sympathetic to using AI in these situations.
One of the major problems I have society is the near impossibility of finding meaning or community. Survival takes up so much effort and energy, even for high earners like doctors and engineers, that there's little time for things which are actually important for humans, like building community, gaining education for its own sake, or otherwise bettering oneself outside of a career. My optimistic views of humanity in general lead me to think that, if you take away this problem of survival like Star Trek attempts to show, more people would engage with their communities and it would be easier for them to find meaning or do something they find engaging, so not as many people would be content just sitting around doing nothing. The stereotype of the lazy basement dweller living in their mom's house at 35 or whatever (I'm just drawing imagery out of a hat) is a symptom of modern society in my opinion, and in an idealistic world these people would be much less likely to be content in this situation.
I do agree re: racism though. I did enjoy my time in college as well, but it wasn't because I was learning or getting a degree, it was because I was part of a tight-knit community of my peers in an environment where we had freedom to explore, think, and hang out.
I talk about survivability because it's easy to grasp, but I'm really referring to any kind of incentive structure. Success, for instance, while similar to survival, is not actually the same thing. Prestige can be something that motivates somebody to be a great artist.
The kinds of lazy basement dwellers I'm talking about are more like people with social anxiety refusing to take phone calls in place of texts. Or, people with executive disfunction watching YouTube instead of getting any work done, which I can speak to personally because I hated doing homework and would watch YouTube instead until the anxiety of deadline failure pushed me into finally getting something done. But that homework was useful.
I obviously believe in the human ability to rise above yesterday's achievements. I am an example of such. I used to have the social anxiety that would have prevented me from talking to you now. I overcame that by having a very insisting personality.
But even so, there are people today who could, even through the tiresome hustle of working day to day, learn to play piano and want to but never do. My concern is leaving people like this to their own devices. To a person who willingly shucks all of life's goals, I think that giving them goals is actually better for them.
There is one particular way in which I think a Star Trek utopia might be overly optimistic, putting it in the realm of hopeful fantasy, and it's that it overlooks the very biological urge to hibernate. The principle of least action, at least as far as education goes, would be not to.
It seems to me that such a world as in Star Trek is either impossible in practice, or sooner or later it will simply collapse.
man, that's a whole lot of fantasy wrapped up around a tool that's propping up fascist oligarchs that are driving the world into a forced plutocracy where we're all enslaved to work for "the company".
I thought the backstory was important to help to cross all my T's and dot all my... lower case J's
Touch grass.
If people believe too much in fantasy and progress, touching the grass is unlikely to help them.