If a Bot Can Do Your Homework, the Assignment was the Problem!

I was watching a recent StarTalk episode where Neil deGrasse Tyson nailed exactly what’s broken in our schools. His core critique is simple: we’ve built schools that obsess over what students know instead of how they think.

We reward recall, not reasoning.

This creates a “just follow the manual” mindset. You see it when a worker shrugs and says, “That wasn’t in the job description.” I’m much more interested in the person who looks at a mess they’ve never seen before and says, “Let me take a crack at it.”

The Merit of “Creative Laziness”

Robert F. Kennedy used to quote George Bernard Shaw on this tension, and it fits perfectly here: “Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.”

In any job, you have the Grinders. They see things as they are, accept the status quo, and start grinder. They see the 20-hour task, the manual spreadsheet, or the repetitive code, and they just put their heads down. Often, they do this because they’re scared. They fear the “Efficiency Trap”: if they automate those 20 hours down to five, they might get “optimized” right out of a paycheck! Or worse, just handed 15 more hours of even more soul-crushing busywork.

But the person who dreams of things that never were asks, “Why not?” anyway. They’re betting their value on the tools they build, not the hours they kill. If your boss is more impressed by a warm body in a chair from 9 to 5 than a genius who solves the problem in twenty minutes, you’re playing for the wrong team.

This is what Bill Gates meant when he said he’d hire a “lazy” person to do a hard job. It sounds harsh, but there’s a logic to it.

If your boss is more impressed by a warm body in a chair from 9 to 5 than a genius who solves the problem in twenty minutes, you’re playing for the wrong team.

A “lazy” person hates wasted effort. While the Grinder is accepting the rules and watching the clock, the creative thinker is asking: “How do I build a system to finish this in one hour so I can go do something that actually matters?”

Working Smarter, Not Harder

In physics, there’s an old saying: a truck stuck in the mud does a lot of work but doesn’t go anywhere. It’s spinning its wheels, burning fuel, and making a lot of noise, but its displacement is zero. That is exactly what the “Grind” feels like.

This isn’t just theory for me. Years ago, I remember the sheer dread of looking at a mountain of 3D models in Maya or a massive stack of images in Photoshop that all needed the same tweaks. The Grinder move is to click through them one by one until your wrist gives out. My move? I spent the morning writing scripts to batch-process the whole lot.

You see this in game dev all the time. Imagine an artist tasked with placing thousands of trees on a distant mountain range (areas the player will never even get close to). A Grinder will spend 40 hours clicking and dragging every single trunk into the dirt. But a talented Technical Artist will spend a few hours building a procedural tool that scatters those trees naturally across the landscape in seconds.

Spending a week hand-placing assets that only exist for background scale isn’t “hard work,” it’s just a refusal to innovate. Solving the problem once so you never have to solve it manually again is the difference between being a laborer and being a craftsman.

Why AI is Exposing the Cracks

We shouldn’t be surprised that our offices are full of “seat-warmers” when our classrooms are designed to produce them. This is why AI is acting as such a massive stress test for our culture.

Much like the old panic over calculators, chatbots are exposing which parts of our “work” were just empty calories all along. We’ve spent decades training students to be human data-entry bots, and now we’re shocked that an actual bot can do the job better!

If a chatbot can do your homework, the assignment was broken before you even started. Think back to school. I still roll my eyes thinking about being forced to memorize the Gettysburg Address. What a colossal waste of a brain! What did that prove? That’s the value in that? It just proved I could ‘Copy-Paste’ information with my voice?

Imagine if we had spent that time actually thinking. What oral traditions was Lincoln leaning into? What imagery was he using to glue a broken country back together? If you had to give that speech today, in a different country under similar heat, what words would you choose? That requires a human pulse.

Changing the Assessment

Tyson is right: we shouldn’t ban the tools; we should change the test. If we’re going to fix this, we have to stop pretending that “busy” equals “learning.” In my own work as an instructional designer, I see the opportunity to stop grading like robots and start teaching like humans:

• Stop rewarding the slog. If a student finds a way to do 20 hours of work in five by using AI effectively, that’s a win, provided the logic and the “tool-building” are theirs.
• Prioritize the “Why.” Design tasks where success depends on iteration and reflection, not just handing in a report that looks like everyone else’s.
• Demand a real-time defense. You want to know if a learner actually gets it? Make them explain their work in real time. You can’t outsource your “fingerprints” to a chatbot during a live conversation.

AI isn’t going to wait for us to fix the workplace or the classroom. We have to decide right now: do we keep propping up systems that can be defeated by a single prompt, or do we start building experiences that actually require a brain?

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Photos by Anton Maksimov 5642.su on Unsplash and ThisisEngineering on Unsplash