2025-05-02 01:33:20

---

The fulcrum of this inqui-ry rests upon a pressing and profound concern, namely: the survival of human intelligence in an era wherein artificial intelligence (AI) has gained significant trac-tion and ubiquity. The very notion of “survival” evokes a narrative of struggle, an enduring contest for continuity and relevance. Struggle, I insist, is not periph-eral to survival; it is for me, its de-fining essence—its sine qua non. Survival is, in effect, a function of struggle, the two are deeply in-terwoven in a dialectical relation-ship. Each animates, punctuates and reinforces the other. What the mathematicians will refer to as function of a function – a composite function whereby the output of one function becomes the input of another. The solution to the problem of delay and need for speed have indeed opened our vista of cognition to the problem of lack of mental resilience (the kind of resilience expressed in cognitive hard work) as opposed to shortcuts occasioned by AI. For those seeking the ideo-logical pedestal upon which this reflection stands, it is this: that the human intellect is increas-ingly being abdicated in favor of algorithmic substitutes. Where once the mind which was the locus of creativity and original thought, it is now fre-quently bypassed, with many relying wholly and unwhole-somely on artificial intelligence to generate content, construct arguments, and process ideas. This growing dependency gives birth to a new form of strug-gle, what I would like to call a cognitive inertia or cognitive passivity, a form of intellectu-al laziness and or ineptitude— wherein the human mind acts like a crawling child, once a walking man but now wrestling to independently conceive and articulate knowledge in a world primed for machine assistance. Alongside this epistemological crisis is the more tactile, but no less significant, corrosive erosion of handwriting—a skill now en-dangered by the prominence of overwhelming presence of dig-ital technology. Empirical stud-ies show that prolonged depen-dence on typing, touchscreens, and voice-to-text interfaces leads to a measurable decline in fine motor skills and legible pen-manship. Handwriting is an art and every art is an expression of the fecundity of the mind. Beyond being an art it is also an act, such that requires intricate neuromuscular coordination. As an act, it is not merely manual, it is even more cerebral. The brain initiates and modulates the act of writing through complex interac-tions between flexor and exten-sor muscles, governed by neural impulses. What we inscribe on the page is, quite literally, a pro-jection of our neurological state. Hence, the study of graphology treats handwriting as a mirror of cognition and character, a signa-ture of personhood. To understand the stakes of “survival” in this context, let us have recourse to historical-bio-logical analogy. Elementary bi-ology teaches us that organs or tissues subjected to frequent use become strengthened and more developed, while those left un-used become atrophy and may vanish over generations. This notion was famously articulated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in his theory of use and disuse. Though modern genetics has enhanced our understanding of heritabili-ty, the central idea endures and is this – disuse invites degeneration. The latter is an unavoidable con-sequence of the former. The human appendix, which the biologists name as a vestigial organ, illustrates this principle. There is scientific position that human appendix was once es-sential in digesting fibrous plant material in our herbivorous an-cestors, but now the appendix shrank and has lost its utility as human diets evolved. The same biological logic ap-plies to the human brain. Though not a muscle in anatomical terms, it suffices for accurate compari-son because, just like the muscle, the brain responds dynamically to stimulation or neglect. Intel-lectual exertion, like physical exercise, cultivates cognitive strength; it sharpens memory, refines analytical faculties, and fortifies neural connections. Conversely, cognitive inertia or passivity breeds mental stag-nation. In previous generations, writing a single essay entailed some significant cognitive pro-cess or symphony of thought ranging from synthesizing knowledge, recalling ideas, an-alyzing relationships, and con-structing coherent arguments. Today, AI tools can perform these tasks with minimal human in-volvement. The result? Intellec-tual disengagement is masked as efficiency. Human content is fading, AI generated content is in surplus, the demography of an-alytical citizenship is becoming small in the chart. We now confront a paradox: a technology designed to augment human cognition increasingly threatens its vitality. The ease with which AI delivers “ready-made” content has turned knowl-edge production into an exercise in automation. Many thinkers of the GenZ generation are re-duced to passive operators—they prompt, receive, copy and then paste. This process undermines the very essence of thought and thinking, which is not about in-stantaneous accuracy but about wrestling with ambiguity, grap-pling with nuance, and etching one’s cognitive signature upon the page. So I pose the problem this way: What becomes of logos and pathos—of logic and emotion— when both are synthesized not from lived experience and re-flection but from predictive al-gorithms? What is lost when the intimate struggle of thinking is outsourced to machine precision? Writing, at its best, is not merely an act of communication—it is a manifestation of identity. Many would agree with the fact that the art and act of writing the process of self-definition. Over time, a reader should recognize your voice even before your name is revealed. To relinquish author-ship to AI is, in a sense, to vanish from the world of scholarship. The brain’s struggle is thus not against AI per se, but against the seduction of ease, indeed it is against the slow decay of the disciplines of thinking, writing, imagining. To forego the rigorous processes that underpin original scholarship is to risk intellectu-al atrophy. Just as the appendix receded through neglect, so too may our capacity for critical rea-soning diminish through disuse. Within this struggle lies the future of education, creativity, and civic responsibility. It must therefore be asked – are we ready to produce citizens who are not mentally disciplined and resil-ient? Citizens who cannot engage in the rigor of intellectual anal-ysis needed to construct well-ar-ticulated thought. If we are to preserve the dis-tinctive brilliance of the human mind, we must resist the impulse to allow AI to replace us. This is not a call for wholesale rejec-tion of technology—far from it. Rather, this writer pleads for moderation, for constructive symbiosis. We ought to wield AI not as a crutch without which our intellectual stamina cannot be impressed, but as a sparring partner, a Socratic gadfly that provokes deeper inquiry. Artificial Intelligence must remain an assistant, not a sur-rogate, for human intellect. Overreliance on AI may well produce a generation of citizens ill-equipped to generate original thought, to navigate social, eco-nomic and political complexity, or to contribute meaningfully to the marketplace of ideas. If we don’t address this challenge, a time may come, if we are not already in that time, when we long for the age when the mind labored over ideas, when mean-ing emerged through imaginative struggle, when writing bore the unmistakable imprint of a living, breathing thinker. If we are to dignify the gift of thought, we must reclaim the practice of thinking itself. *Antia writes from Faculty of Law, Topfaith University, Mkpatak, Akwa Ibom State