Jona Ragogna

I always enjoy hearing why people do what they do, so here is my current why.

Our brains love to preserve energy.¹ We are primordially biased toward a calculation where we give little and get lots. And "lots" may come in the forms of food, sex, or status. The problem begins, however, when we understand that though getting lots for giving little is intensely alluring, it's a path to emptiness both on a neuro-circuit-level as well as philosophically.²

And, the problem intensifies when we turn to look at what our world's most popular consumer technologies (from digital media to now AI) implicitly offer: satisfaction for no effort. I am most concerned with this in the world of higher education, where we see more than 85% of students relying on AI to complete their academic work.³ In the few years AI has been around, we already know that over-reliance on it is linked to decreased schema formation (i.e., no real learning happening)⁴ and decreased critical thinking, especially in students.⁵

But, though we don't yet have data to back me, I am even more worried about an existential emptiness of meaning that could come from a lack of cognitive challenge faced by our world's young adults⁶ (which includes me) through the advent of dependence on machines. In light of dropping literacy rates,⁷ I view AI as additional gasoline on the fire. History has certainly shown us that dulling a society's intellect is a sure-fire way to weaken it. I'm still at the very ground level of my journey, but these are the worries that currently drive my thirst to learn and join the academic conversation.

Thank you for reading this,
Jona Berlin, Germany, on January 12th, 2026