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Agatha Christie wrote the intricately plotted novel And Then There Were None because, she later explained, she wanted to attempt something really hard: “I had written this book because it was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me.”
This human tendency — to push ourselves to do things we know will be difficult — might well help to explain our success as a species. So, at least, argued the mathematician and philosopher Jacob Bronowski in a wonderful 1973 documentary series called The Ascent of Man, in which he said man’s unique gift was “his immense pleasure in exercising and pushing forward his own skill”.
Yet half a century later, some worry our ascent might have ground to a halt, or even gone into reverse. The OECD’s latest Pisa assessment results, which show a steepening decline in the reading, mathematics and science abilities of 15-year-olds in many countries, have caused understandable alarm. But what would have been even more worrying to Bronowski, I suspect, are the signs that a growing number of young people have developed a distaste for effort itself.
The OECD noted that the proportion of young people taking the test who were “hasty readers” — giving fast but incorrect answers — rose from 6.6 to 11.4 per cent between 2018 and 2025.
This is supported by the questionnaires filled in by the students. On average across OECD countries, about one-third of students reported that they quit doing homework if it was too long, and this share increased in almost all educational systems between 2022 and 2025. Only about half of students disagreed or strongly disagreed that they gave up easily, and this share fell in almost all educational systems between 2022 and 2025.
Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills, told me this was “certainly one of the big contributors for declining learning outcomes”. The declines in reading performance, for example, were fastest in those “areas which require cognitive effort” such as carefully comparing, evaluating and integrating multiple pieces of information.
It would be unfair to attribute this trend solely to AI — not least since the declines began before the technology became mainstream in 2022. But Schleicher is surely right that it is now “a contributor”, since these tools make cognitively taxing tasks easier to complete.
Many educators, at both school and university level, have been urging their pupils to use generative AI as a personal tutor, rather than as a homework-generating machine. They often turn to analogies like going to the gym: the point is not to move the weights around from one place to another, they say. The point is what happens inside you while you do it yourself.
But off-the-peg general-purpose LLMs are trained to be flattering and relentlessly helpful — not necessarily the qualities one needs in a tutor. Imagine being at the gym with a personal trainer who keeps whispering in your ear: “Wow, you’re so fit! You’re an Adonis already! Would you like me to lift the next one for you?”
These problems can be surmounted. Studies suggest that AI tools specifically tailored for education, with careful guardrails in place, can help young people to learn without relieving them of the “productive struggle” that true progress requires.
But what of those of us who have already left education behind? Some adults will no doubt find ways to keep attempting cognitively hard things in their professional lives, either with or without the use of AI tools. Yet not everybody has the autonomy at work to prioritise effort over speed, especially if employers reset their expectations about how quickly their AI-enabled employees should generate results.
When researchers at Microsoft reported that generative AI tools “reduce the perceived effort of critical thinking” in a survey of knowledge workers, for example, they quoted one participant who explained: “In sales, I must reach a certain quota daily or risk losing my job. Ergo, I use AI to save time and don’t have much room to ponder over the result.”
To lose our taste for effort would not just risk an intellectual slide backwards. It would also mean the loss of one of life’s truest joys: succeeding at something you found really hard to do.
Christie’s And Then There Were None became one of the bestselling novels of all time. But it wasn’t the book’s outward success that gave her the most pleasure. “It was well received and reviewed,” she wrote, “but the person who was really pleased with it was myself, for I knew better than any critic how difficult it had been.”