From agency to AI-pathy: what US campus sentiment could show about the future of AI
Image: pxhere
This spring in America, a new ritual emerged on college campuses. Mention Artificial Intelligence on stage and the crowd turns sour.
At the University of Central Florida, an executive told arts and communications graduates that AI was "the next industrial revolution". Booing started at once.
Next at Middle Tennessee State, music mogul Scott Borchetta was jeered by students and snapped back: "Deal with it. It's a tool."
Then at the University of Arizona, former Google boss Eric Schmidt was booed repeatedly.
Even the AI announcer at a community college in Arizona got heckled as it garbled and skipped students' names at their own graduation.
US polling might explain some of the anger.
Half of American adults say AI makes them more concerned than excited (Pew, June 2025). Just 5% believe AI development is led by people or organisations who “represent their interests”. 47% say it is not. The remaining half say they do not know enough to judge (Quinnipiac, March 2026). Among Gen Z, 81% expect AI to cut job opportunities.
21 months ago I coined a word for the quieter danger behind all this: AI-pathy.
My argument was that as AI removes tasks, choices and small struggles from our lives, we risk sliding from convenience into apathy. Psychologists call it cognitive offloading: handing thinking to external tools (Risko and Gilbert, 2016).
Perhaps these boos are part of the same theme.
The academic evidence might have hardened since I published my original blog on AI-pathy.
A 2025 study of 666 people found that heavier AI use was associated with weaker critical thinking, with cognitive offloading the suspected mechanism. Younger users showed the strongest effect (Gerlich, 2025). MIT researchers also found similar patterns with essay writing in their own small preprint study: those participants showed less ownership, weaker recall and shallower engagement.
Some philosophers from antiquity saw this coming. Aristotle argued that flourishing is an activity. We become good at living by doing the living ourselves. Take away the doing and you take away the flourishing.
Psychologist Martin Seligman spent fifty years working on the idea of helplessness. His famous experiments were first read as showing that we learn to give up when outcomes stop depending on our actions.
In 2016 Seligman, in partnership with neuroscientist Steven Maier, made a further proposal. Passivity, they concluded, is the default state for people. What we learn is control.
Perhaps a world where the machine drafts, decides and drives does not teach us helplessness. It instead simply stops teaching us control.
The graduates booing Eric Schmidt et al. are certainly not apathetic about the future they feel awaits them. They are furious.
But the worry is a year after the ceremony, when the job market grinds, the tools are everywhere, and resistance quietly becomes resignation. Anger burns out. Apathy settles in.
So, a big question for the next decade is not whether AI arrives. It is whether humans stay in training or become AI-pathetic.
At ForgeFront we build our tools around a central proposition: they help you make better decisions. They give you control and agency.
Sure, AI can widen the options and sharpen the evidence. But ultimately the call, the responsibility and the satisfaction of the call can still stay human.
The Class of 2026 booed. Good. Booing means they still care. Our job is to build a world where they never stop.
At a time when the world is at the apex of generational change, this human-led agency will be the most important thing for securing humanity’s normative future.