The Cost of Convenience
Why a teenager believes learning should still hurt a little, and why I agree
On a shoot last week, I had the opportunity to ask a clear-eyed teenager about AI.
She’s grown up on the hinge of something; between an analog childhood and an AI-saturated future. That space between is full of questions, and I find myself fascinated by what young people make of it.
She told me, “I’m really thankful to have grown up without the use of AI in daily life, and then see it start to become a bigger thing.”
That pause between eras has given her perspective. Like me, she remembers what it was like to learn without the shortcut. And while she’s watched the world bend toward convenience, she doesn’t sound convinced that’s always a good thing.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot: what do we lose when we gain efficiency?
If AI can write a song or paint a portrait faster than we can: what’s left for us?
So I asked her about this conundrum. She said, “Learning isn’t just learning the thing itself. You’re also learning how to work hard… how to put in effort.” (Side note: she speaks three languages and plays multiple instruments, so she knows something about learning.)
The skill is one outcome, yes. But it’s not the whole story. There’s pain, patience, discipline, and doubt in the process. And it seems to me, that’s where the real learning lives.
AI can be trained on all the world’s music, all the rules of grammar, all the structures of story. It can access information instantly, but does that mean it truly understands it?
In a world where machines can do the knowing for us…is learning more valuable than knowledge now? What happens to our sense of self when we outsource knowing?
“There’s no satisfaction internally,” she said, imagining a world where you could upload any skill instantly to your brain.
No trying.
No failing.
No 10,000 hours.
And while that sounds seductive on the surface (think of all the things we could do!), she called it what it is: “instant gratification.”
But here’s what haunts me: if you take away the learning, you take away the failure. And if you take away the failure, you take away the art. Right!?
So much of art (however you want to define it) comes from friction; from not getting it right the first (or hundredth) time. Struggle and iteration are the raw materials. They get shaped by heat and pressure into something reflective, something communicative. Art without that pressure feels cold to me (manufactured, not made).
So we return to this question: what makes something human?
If we can offload all the effort.
If we can sidestep the sweat.
Is what’s left still ours?
She pointed to language as a metaphor. Translation tools can give you the words, but not the weight. “You would have the knowledge of the language,” she said, “but you wouldn’t have the knowledge of the full experience.”
And maybe that’s what this all comes down to: experience.
The embodied, emotional, imperfect journey of learning, failing, being humbled, feeling weak, getting back up, and trying again.
We can build machines that perform, that mimic, that even move us. But they can’t feel the stakes of the process. They don’t get blisters on their fingers. They don’t cry in frustration or laugh when something finally clicks.
We do. And that struggle is not a glitch in the system. It is the system.
I’ve spent enough time in editing bays and field shoots to know that beauty rarely arrives on the first try. The work teaches us something the shortcut never could: how to care, how to know when to walk away, how to return, and how to stay with it when it gets hard.
And I wouldn’t trade that for perfection.
Would you?