Essays

These essays are not a collection of separate interventions on a fashionable subject.

They form part of a single inquiry into judgement, education, and what artificial intelligence is changing in the conditions of thought itself.

The central question running through this work is simple, though not easy:

What happens to human judgement when systems increasingly generate, structure, and resolve cognitive processes on our behalf?

The essays are organised conceptually rather than chronologically, across five domains. Each addresses a necessary layer of the same argument.

Conceptual domains

Foundations of Judgement – What Judgement is

These essays clarify the distinction between judgement and other forms of cognition, such as prediction, decision-making, and execution. They argue that judgement is not the application of rules to known situations, but the capacity to determine what matters when no rule is sufficient, and to assume responsibility for what follows.

Formation of Judgement – How judgement is formed

Judgement is not acquired through information alone. It is formed through experience, practice, resistance, error, revision, and sustained encounters with situations that cannot be solved by procedure alone. These essays examine the conditions under which that formation becomes possible.

Mechanism of Delegated Thinking – How thinking is displaced

Artificial intelligence not only automates tasks. It increasingly enters the process earlier. It helps frame questions, organise possibilities, suggest distinctions, and propose answers before the mind has fully determined what it is trying to understand. These essays explore that shift: the gradual outsourcing of cognitive initiative itself.

Education and Institutions – What follows institutionally

If judgement depends on specific conditions of formation, institutions matter. Schools, universities, assessments, incentives, and cultural norms either preserve those conditions or quietly erode them. These essays ask what education must protect, redesign, and recover in the age of intelligent machines.

Tradition and Intellectual Perspective – What helps us understand it

The deepest questions raised by AI are often older than AI itself. These essays place the present moment in conversation with philosophers, historians, and earlier thinkers who reflected on judgement, freedom, responsibility, language, technique, and human formation. What is new is technological. Much else is not.

Reading Path

For first-time readers, this sequence offers the clearest introduction to the project’s central argument.

It begins by defining the distinction between execution and judgement, then examines how judgement is formed, how delegated thinking emerges, and why all this matters for education and public life.

→ Thinking When Machines Think

→ Prediction, Decision, Deliberation, and Judgement

→ From Turing to Delegated Thinking

→ Wonder, Aporia, and the Conditions of Thinking

→ When the Answer is Correct but the Mind is not Formed

→ Artificial Intelligence Is Not the Problem. Education Is.

→ Mimetic Desire, Power and the Risk of Delegated Thinking

→ Technology, Humanism and the Purpose of Education

A Final Note

This project does not argue against tools.

It argues that a civilisation increasingly organised around intelligent assistance must become more serious about the conditions under which human judgement is formed.

Because what can be delegated and what must remain human are not the same thing.

The inquiry begins with first principles.

Judgement cannot be examined in its development without first establishing what it is and why it cannot be reduced to execution.

↓

Foundations of Judgement

What Judgement is

These essays establish what judgement is by distinguishing it from prediction, decision-making, and execution, and by clarifying why it cannot be reduced to any of them.

Once judgement is clarified, the question becomes how it is formed — and under what conditions it fails to emerge.

↓

Formation of Judgement

How Judgement is Formed

These essays examine how judgement is formed through practice, experience, and irreversible engagement with resistance.

  • Why Students Still Need One Another in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

    Artificial intelligence may become an extraordinary intellectual companion. It can explain, guide, correct and adapt to the learner with remarkable effectiveness. But education has never depended only on access to knowledge. It has also depended on encounters with other people whose perspectives were not organised around our own. Those encounters reveal assumptions we could not…

  • Why Judgement Requires Independent Reality

    Artificial intelligence can challenge us. It can question our assumptions, present opposing views, and even simulate a Socratic conversation. But there is a deeper educational question: Is a challenge generated by a system designed around the learner equivalent to an encounter with something that is genuinely independent of the learner? For centuries, education has relied…

  • The Formation of Judgement in the Age of AI

    Formative friction occurs when the framework itself is no longer sufficient, when the situation resists interpretation according to the categories available to the individual. In such moments, the task is not to solve a problem, but to reconsider what the problem is. A system calibrated to the user cannot at the same time be genuinely…

  • Edgar Morin and the Educational Question of the AI Age

    The ability to generate connections is not the same thing as the ability to judge their significance. A system may propose relationships between ideas. It may produce interpretations. It may generate frameworks through which a situation can be understood. Yet none of these answers a more fundamental question: which of those interpretations matters? Which framework…

  • AI and the Disappearance of Intellectual Silence

    Thought requires an interval of not-yet-knowing; artificial intelligence, by filling that interval before it can do its work, threatens to eliminate the very silence from which genuine ideas emerge.

  • When the Answer Is Correct but the Mind Is Not Formed

    Obtaining a correct result and being intellectually formed by the process of reaching it are not equivalent — and artificial intelligence makes that distinction, which education has always depended on, impossible to ignore.

  • AI didn’t destroy critical thinking. It exposed how fragile it already was

    Artificial intelligence did not erode critical thinking in schools and universities — it revealed how unevenly institutions had been cultivating it, and removed the conditions under which that unevenness could remain invisible.

  • Without Books, No Judgement: Literacy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

    Ferguson’s argument is not nostalgic: if deep reading weakens, the loss is not cultural but structural — a degradation in the formation of analysis, sustained attention and the kind of judgement that literacy alone makes possible.

  • The Pedagogy of Effort in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

    Effort is not a nostalgic virtue — it is the structural condition under which understanding consolidates, memory stabilises and the habits of disciplined inquiry form; artificial intelligence, by removing cognitive friction, does not assist this process but risks bypassing it.

If judgement is formed under specific conditions, the question arises of how contemporary systems are altering those conditions.

↓

Mechanism of Delegated Thinking

How thinking is Displaced

These essays analyse how AI-mediated systems restructure the origin of thinking by pre-empting cognitive initiative, removing friction, and shaping the conditions under which problems appear.

Because judgement depends on specific conditions of formation, the question of institutional responsibility follows necessarily.

↓

Education and Institutions

Institutional Responsibility for Judgement

These essays examine what education must preserve and design if judgement is to remain possible, focusing on the institutional conditions under which it can be formed.

  • AI, Plagiarism, and Intellectual Authorship in the IB Diploma Programme

    Artificial intelligence does not abolish authorship — it forces education to define, with greater precision than before, what genuine intellectual ownership has always required.

  • Europe’s Soft Power and the Educational Question

    Europe’s civilisational influence has never been primarily economic; if it weakens, the question is whether its educational institutions still know how to form the judgement and sense of responsibility on which that influence depends.

  • Technology, Humanism and the Purpose of Education

    Humanism is not a nostalgic alternative to technological acceleration — it is the only framework that keeps the question of what kind of human beings education should form from collapsing into the question of what the economy currently requires.

  • When the Architects of AI Begin to Hesitate

    When the people building intelligent systems begin to doubt their consequences, the moment demands more than technological caution — it demands the kind of institutional and educational seriousness that has been slow to respond.

  • The Adolescence of Technology: What Education Must Do Next

    If technology is advancing faster than our collective capacity to govern it, education must become the place where judgement matures before power does — and it must recognise that it has not yet accepted that responsibility.

  • Are University Degrees Still Worth It?

    The question is not whether credentials retain market value, but whether universities still cultivate the judgement, intellectual formation and capacity for responsible reasoning that no credential can substitute for.

  • What Do Students Choose After Secondary School? A Comparison Between Spain and France

    Student choices after secondary school reveal not only preferences but the institutional logics through which two societies imagine the relationship between knowledge, profession and the future of the person.

  • What Generative AI Is Changing in Upper Secondary and Sixth Form

    As execution becomes easier to automate, upper secondary education faces a structural choice: continue rewarding performance, or begin forming the traceable reasoning and disciplined judgement that performance was always meant to evidence.

  • Education in the Intention Economy

    When platforms begin to predict and shape human intentions before they become conscious desires, digital literacy is no longer sufficient — education must defend the inner space from which free judgement and genuine autonomy emerge.

  • The Cloister and the Spaceship: Neil Ferguson on the Future of the University

    Ferguson’s provocative proposal — that universities need both a technology-free cloister and an AI-intensive spaceship — is less a structural blueprint than a recognition that formation and acceleration cannot share the same undifferentiated space.

To understand the limits of this transformation, it is necessary to situate it within a longer intellectual tradition.

↓

Tradition and Intellectual Perspective

What Helps Us Understand it

These essays engage philosophical and historical traditions to clarify the nature and limits of judgement, and to situate the present transformation within a longer intellectual horizon.

  • What Habermas Can Still Teach Us in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

    Habermas distinguished between rationality oriented toward efficiency and rationality oriented toward understanding; artificial intelligence expands the first with extraordinary force, making the second more fragile and more necessary.

  • Thinking with Others. On Intellectual Debts in an Age of Intelligent Machines

    Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Dewey, Habermas and others did not write about artificial intelligence — yet the questions they posed about knowledge, habit, language and deliberation are exactly the ones its arrival forces us to confront.

  • Jacques Ellul and Education Today: Three Short Lessons

    Ellul’s deepest warning was not about any specific technology, but about the moment when efficiency becomes the criterion by which all human activity — including education — is permitted to justify itself.

  • Is Europe’s “Decline” Inevitable?

    The fall of Rome was not primarily a military defeat — it was a structural failure of the middle class, elite responsibility and institutional coherence; Europe’s current anxieties deserve to be read against that specific history.

  • El mono, el búho y el papagayo

    La inteligencia aparente no equivale a comprensión, y repetir con brillantez — como el papagayo — nunca ha sido lo mismo que juzgar con criterio — como el búho.

  • Günther Anders and the Promethean Gap in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

    Anders called it the Promethean disparity — the gap between what we can now build and what we can imagine its consequences to be; education is where that disparity either widens unchecked or begins to close.

  • The Bic Cristal and the Quiet Transformation of Education

    When France lifted the ban on ballpoint pens in 1965, a seemingly trivial change quietly altered the relationship between the hand, the error and the willingness to revise — a reminder that the most consequential educational transformations arrive without announcement.

  • Jacques Delors and the Four Pillars of Education

    Delors’ four pillars — knowing, doing, living together, being — were not philosophically novel, but he gave them institutional authority at the precise moment when education most needed a framework that resisted reduction to economic function.