Episode Details

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.

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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.

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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