Eating the Seed Corn

How AI Is Destroying the Formation It Needs to Replace

My mother tried to teach me my multiplication tables. I squirmed. I whined. I ran. Eventually I climbed onto the window ledge — which in India means perching behind metal rods that run vertically across the frame, the kind that keep you from falling three stories. My mother is a short woman. Up on that ledge, her hands couldn’t reach me. A small boy’s tactical victory.

She gave up. My mother was patient, but there are limits. She did something she almost never did: she drew my father into it. He was a reluctant conscript when it came to homework. That was her domain. But she was done, and I was on the window, triumphant.

So my father — tall, quiet, not a man who raised his voice — walked over to the window. And tall as he was, he didn’t need to climb. He just pulled up right in front of me and met my gaze. Right there, through the metal rods, eye to eye. The tactical advantage I’d won over my mother evaporated in an instant. He didn’t yell. He didn’t threaten. He just looked at me, steady, and said: belt it out.

And I did. Because it was the only way down with dignity.

Seven eights are fifty-six. Nine sevens are sixty-three. Twelve twelves are a hundred and forty-four. I belted them out through the metal bars to my father’s face, and somewhere between the sixes and the nines, the numbers stopped being punishment and started being pattern. Not because I wanted to learn. Because the struggle was the only door back into the house.

That was formation. I didn’t know the word then. I do now. And I’ve spent thirty-six years on factory floors watching it happen — and watching it get destroyed.

—

Here’s what nobody tells you about the multiplication tables. The arithmetic wasn’t the point. The architecture was. When you struggle through the recitation until the numbers become relationships instead of sounds, you’re building something underneath. Pattern recognition. Number sense. The ability to look at a column of figures thirty years later and feel, before you’ve checked the math, that something is off. The way you feel a wrong note on the sitar before your brain names the raga.

Then came the calculator. Fine. Nobody mourned long division. But the calculator only worked — I mean really worked, as a tool in the hands of a thinking person — if the person using it had already done the work by hand. The engineer who punches numbers into a spreadsheet and catches the error before the formula does? She can do that because the foundation was already poured.

Then came the computer. Same principle, higher abstraction. The finite element analysis is only as good as the engineer who can interrogate it — who knows what the beam deflection should roughly look like before the software renders it, because she once solved those problems with pencil and paper and cursing.

Now comes AI. And here is where the pattern breaks.

AI doesn’t stand at the window and say belt it out. AI opens the window and says don’t worry, I’ll do the multiplication for you. And the child never comes down. Never builds the foundation. Never gets the dignity of having done it himself.

—

Frank Landymore, writing in Futurism this week, reports what more than a dozen humanities professors are telling anyone who’ll listen: AI is not just enabling cheating. It is destroying their students’ capacity to think. “Incapable of reading and analyzing, synthesizing data, all kinds of skills” — that’s Michael Clune, a literature professor at Ohio State, describing what walks into his classroom now.

The research backs him up. A Carnegie Mellon study from early 2025 found that knowledge workers who regularly used and trusted AI tools were losing their critical thinking skills. Not stagnating. Losing. An earlier study linked students who relied on ChatGPT to memory loss, procrastination, and worsening academic performance. And an MIT study that ran EEG scans on subjects writing essays with and without ChatGPT found that AI users showed the lowest levels of cognitive engagement during the tasks.

The lowest levels of cognitive engagement. The brain wasn’t struggling and failing. It was idling. The engine was barely running.

Dora Zhang, a literature professor at UC Berkeley, told Landymore she now talks to her students about AI “not under the framework of cheating or academic honesty but in terms that are frankly existential. What is it doing to us as a species?”

Good question. Let me offer an answer from the factory floor.

—

In manufacturing, we call it apprenticeship. And the people who understood it best were the Germans. The medieval Zünfte — the guilds — built an entire civilization around the idea that you don’t hand a young person a credential and call them ready. You put them under a master. You make them a Geselle, a journeyman, for years. You make them struggle with the material — wood, metal, cloth, numbers — until the knowledge isn’t in their head anymore. It’s in their hands. That system didn’t survive six centuries because it was romantic. It survived because it worked.

I call it formation. The period — months, years, sometimes a decade — during which a worker builds the mental models that allow them to see what the machine cannot. The operator who hears a bearing going bad before the vibration sensor picks it up. The quality engineer who looks at a run of parts and knows the die is drifting before the measurement confirms it.

A quality engineer I knew at GM — a man named Denny Hagman, who hired in as an hourly assembler and never got an engineering degree — once told me that if you want to know what’s wrong with a part or a process, talk to the person who performs that function three hundred times a day.

Three hundred times a day. That’s the multiplication tables of the shop floor. The repetition builds something that no sensor array and no algorithm can replicate.

And what the professors are watching happen in their classrooms is the interruption of that process. Not the replacement of a skill. The prevention of a skill from ever developing. The MIT EEG study isn’t measuring laziness. It’s measuring arrested development. The neural pathways that should be forming under cognitive load are sitting dormant. And there’s growing evidence that the window for certain kinds of critical thinking is narrow. Miss it, and you don’t get it back.

—

So here we are. The automation lobby’s argument has always been: workers can’t think, so replace them with machines. That’s the pitch. That’s the ROI slide.

But now the same companies making that argument — OpenAI, Microsoft, xAI — are pouring tens of millions into teachers’ unions and school systems, handing out free AI tools to a generation of students, partnering with universities to embed their products into every assignment and every major. Elon Musk just launched what he calls the “world’s first nationwide AI-powered education program” in El Salvador — a million students across thousands of public schools, all using his Grok chatbot.

“These companies are giving these technological tools away partly because they’re hoping to addict a generation of students,” Eric Hayot, a comparative literature professor at Penn State, told Landymore. He’s not wrong. Handing out free AI tools to students is not unlike the subsidized Coke dispensers in school cafeterias — peddling sugar to children and calling it refreshment. Get them hooked early. Let the dependency do the selling later.

We know how that story ended. A Harvard study found that each daily serving of a sugary drink raised a child’s risk of obesity by sixty percent. Childhood obesity tripled in a generation. By the time 96 percent of American high schools had soda vending machines on campus, we had let commercial interests shape our children’s bodies in exchange for school revenue. It took decades of lawsuits, legislation, and parental outrage to claw the machines back out.

Now we’re doing it again. Same playbook. Different product. This time they’re not fattening the body. They’re starving the mind. You are letting their commerce harm your child.

I’ll say this plainly: if I see AI deployed in my grandchildren’s classroom as a substitute for thinking, I will volunteer full-time to homeschool them. Period. I didn’t spend thirty-six years watching intelligence get suppressed on factory floors to sit quietly while it gets suppressed in a second-grade classroom.

But it’s worse than the soda machines. Worse than addiction. It’s sterilization.

They are eating the seed corn.

In agriculture, seed corn is the portion of the harvest you set aside for next year’s planting. You don’t eat it. You don’t sell it. You protect it, because without it there is no next crop.

Human formation is the seed corn of the knowledge economy. Every engineer, every quality technician, every nurse, every teacher, every line worker who can hear the bearing going bad — they exist because someone, somewhere, made them do the work. Made them write the essay by hand. Made them solve the problem on paper. Made them do the function three hundred times a day until the knowing was in their hands, not just their head.

They exist because someone stood at the window and said: belt it out.

And now we’re feeding that seed corn into the chatbot. We’re consuming the formation to produce this quarter’s productivity gains. We’re optimizing the present by liquidating the future.

Why?

Greed. Not malice — I’ll grant them that. But greed that cannot see past the quarterly earnings call to the civilizational consequences. Train a human being: twenty years. Deploy a chatbot: twenty minutes. The ROI math is irresistible, until you realize you’ve sterilized the field and there’s nothing left to plant.

—

Now let me tell you something that might surprise you, given everything I’ve just said.

I love AI. I use it every day. I am wielding it right now like a samurai wields a sword — with precision, with intent, with thirty-six years of pattern recognition guiding every stroke.

I can do that because I am reasonably formed. My mother’s multiplication tables. A degree in mechanical engineering. A PhD in industrial engineering. Decades of getting beat up on the production floor and in the boardroom. The formation happened first. Then the tool arrived. And in my hands, it sings. It amplifies everything I already know. It lets me do in an afternoon what used to take a week. It is, without exaggeration, the most powerful instrument I’ve ever held.

But the sword is only as good as the swordsman. AI in the hands of a formed human is magnificent. AI in the hands of an unformed human is a crutch that prevents them from ever learning to stand.

—

Here’s what gives me hope, and it comes from Landymore’s reporting too.

Some professors are fighting back. They’re giving oral examinations. Requiring handwritten notebooks. Demanding that students show photographs of their notes. A faculty-run initiative called AgainstAI is advising professors on how to design around the technology. And several professors told Futurism they’re noticing more students pushing back — recognizing that they are, as Zhang put it, “the guinea pigs in this giant social experiment.”

Clune said something that I want to end with, because it’s the thing I’ve been trying to say for three years from the manufacturing floor: “There’s kind of defeatism, this idea that there’s no stopping technology and resistance is futile, everything will be crushed in its path. That needs to change.”

He’s right. It does need to change.

Because the argument was never about stopping technology. It was about protecting formation. It was about understanding that the value of a human being isn’t what they produce on a Tuesday afternoon — it’s the decades of struggle that gave them eyes the machine doesn’t have.

You don’t get that from a chatbot. You get it from the struggle.

And if we eat the seed corn — if we hand every student a Grok subscription and call it education, if we skip the formation and go straight to the deployment — then there will be nothing left to deploy. Nothing left to automate. Nothing left to extract.

Just machines talking to machines about what humans used to know.

—

This essay was prompted by Frank Landymore’s reporting in Futurism: “Professors Say AI Is Destroying Their Students’ Ability to Think” (March 14, 2026). The research cited — Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and the student performance study — is drawn from Landymore’s article.

Dr. Venki Padmanabhan is a plant manager at Advanced Drainage Systems in Wooster, Ohio, and the author of the forthcoming book Already Paid For: Why Unlocking Frontline Intelligence Beats Automating Workers Away. He writes The Long Game at thelonggameforall.substack.com.