Tsinghua University’s Yang Bin: The Fourth Type of Growth Deterrent for Youth—Abusing AI to Do Work for Them

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Source: Tsinghua University Institute for Sustainable Social Value

Misusing AI to do things for you is becoming a “fourth experience blocker” in the growth of today’s youth.

Once you misuse AI, it’s not just taking up time and changing the scenario—it will directly replace the very process of thinking, struggling, and creating itself—

Be careful: don’t let learning appear complete, while growth quietly stays absent…

In his book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt reveals two experience blockers that are eroding contemporary youths’ growth: one is a security-minded safetyism that overprotects—families, schools, and society shield children from all risks, turning growth into a greenhouse stroll with almost no setbacks; the second is smart phones and social media, which seize attention with algorithms, crowd out reality with the virtual world, and reconstruct a “mobile childhood.” Together, they deprive teenagers of the embodied learning (embodied learning) and real life experience they need for growth, producing a pampered generation whose bodies have grown up but whose minds remain immature—an anxious generation.

In the Chinese-language version’s recommended preface to the book, I particularly added a third experience blocker—carpenter thinking. This education model, characterized by precision shaping, goal supremacy, and utilitarian, inwardly competitive “performance-first” rigor, turns children into “high-quality products” through standardized training and exam-oriented learning—thereby also severing teenagers’ connection with real experiences. Young people who grow along the path of carpenter thinking spend their days chewing on disembodied knowledge, ticking off growth checklists; it looks like they meet milestone after milestone, but in the end they fall into a void of meaning, and they can easily become outstanding sheep—an empty-hearted generation.

Before proposing the newly emerging fourth experience blocker, I want to clarify the concept of embodied-from-the-heart learning. In my article Embodied Learning and Slow Work, I proposed that heart-engaged learning (emsouled learning) echoes embodied learning, while placing even more emphasis on inner growth. It is a way of learning that requires learners to immerse their whole authentic self—body and mind—into the learning process, deeply coupling learning with life experiences, emotional connection, self-cognition, and community relationships, rather than treating knowledge as a mere “container.” The key to heart-engaged learning lies in achieving inner growth through independent thinking, reflective processing of setbacks, and interpersonal interaction—realizing the shaping of the qualities of both “adulthood” and “belonging to a group.” This is a core growth experience that AI cannot do for you, and is also very difficult to simulate.

Safetyism protection, smart phones and social media, and carpenter thinking all pursue superior performance—yet they share a highly consistent core: the process of youth growth is eroded by “disembodiment” and “emptiness.” They deprive children of first-hand experience in choosing for themselves, replaying and reflecting after setbacks, and handling interpersonal conflicts—causing growth to remain superficial, unable to take root in real life, and making it hard to form embodied and heart-engaged experiences that are unique and can support a lifetime.

Now, generative AI is rapidly entering campuses and homes, and the fourth experience blocker has already arrived—“misusing AI to do things for you,” meaning that teenagers use AI’s do-for-you functions without restraint. This is fundamentally different from the first three experience blockers: misusing AI to do things for you is no longer just squeezing or distorting the “scenes” where experience happens—it directly “replaces” the “core” of experience itself: the very process of thinking, creating, and struggling. At the root, it suppresses the emergence of real learning and heart-engaged experiences, bringing entirely new—and even more serious—growth risks.

During the process of AI doing things for you, there is yet another related danger: many AIs intentionally include anthropomorphic design, excessive empathy, and total compliance, which can make teenagers develop extremely strong emotional and communication dependence, distorting their understanding of genuine interpersonal interactions. Real relationships include differences, friction, equal-bargaining, and delayed rewards. Meanwhile, the instant gratification, bottomless flattery, and principle-less praising output by AI large models make it hard for teenagers—who lack lived experience of the ways the world goes—to tolerate real life’s imperfections after they get used to it, further dissolving their motivation to step into reality and participate in genuine communication. This destroys, at a fundamental level, the underlying logic by which people stretch, meet setbacks, and then grow. Its harms are far more thorough than addiction to smart phones and social media—and far harder to reverse.

These are the three core harms of misusing AI to do things for you to teenagers’ growth: first, it prevents real learning from taking place—skipping the thinking process, making tasks look finished but failing to achieve knowledge internalization; second, it blocks the generation of heart-engaged experience—without heart, without deep thinking that puts oneself into the situation, one won’t obtain growth insights that take root in the mind; third, it distorts one’s understanding of real socialization—by getting used to unconditional compliance performed by AI, it’s difficult to adapt to the complexity and friction of real interpersonal life in the real, wide world.

The birth of heart-engaged experience cannot happen without active refinement through thinking, independent choices and judgment, real reflection on setbacks, and deep emotional investment. One-click do-for-you by general AI directly removes all cognitive resistance, making teenagers skip “production-type struggles”: no need to grind through deep thought or meditate, no need to repeatedly refine, no need to confront mistakes head-on. Assignments, essays, and other learning tasks appear to be completed efficiently, but in reality there is no genuine heart-and-mind investment, and the experience is blocked. This kind of fake learning won’t take long to cause thinking to grow dull, creativity to dry up, and a gradual loss of the ability to solve problems independently—while also cultivating increasingly stronger learned helpless, self-doubt. Psychologically, one becomes dependent on AI crutches; cognitively, one can’t distinguish the truth and falsehood of AI outputs; in taste and judgment, one lacks nourishment from seeking difference and novelty. These systemic cognitive offloads will ultimately lead to loss of skill and loss of function, causing the compounded worsening of anxious, fragile, empty problems.

In the AI era, the value weightings of different forms of learning have undergone an irreversible reversal. Because what AI is best at doing for you is precisely what traditional disembodied education (abstract memorization, mechanical practice drills, standardized output) emphasizes—therefore the scope for this narrow “intelligence” is clearly shrinking. By contrast, the value of embodied learning (direct body experience and hands-on practice) and heart-engaged learning (full immersion and inward seeking) is more prominently highlighted than ever—yet this is “heart-force” that AI cannot copy or replace. It is the core and essence of what makes humans human. Through AI-exponent thinking, further return to fundamentals and bring things back to the “heart” from the “intelligence,” and this is the trend in how teenagers’ learning goals are changing.

I mentioned in my New Year’s message for the Year of the Horse in Three Thoughts on “Slow AI”: we need to embrace AI, but teenagers should “use it slowly.” “Use it slowly” here means AI aimed at teenagers—absolutely should not be a simple “take-and-use” mentality, taking a general-purpose tool and using it directly. Instead, it must follow the rules of learning and growth and be specially designed for that purpose. Core guidelines you can consider include: inspiration and training rather than do-for-you, and not replacing everything. This aligns perfectly with the educational wisdom of “not awakening unless in perplexity; not letting it out unless one is stuck.” AI’s mission should not be to do everything for you from the starting line; rather, when teenagers have gone through independent exploration and reached the critical thinking-stretching point of “seeking connection but not yet attaining it” (frustration/anger) and “wanting to speak but unable to express” (pent-up inability), provide timely, well-calibrated inspiration and guidance—acting as scaffolding for expansion and co-creation—protecting embodied and heart-engaged experiences brought by active exploration.

This is not only the real need of education and learning; it is also an inevitable requirement for AI to do good. AI companies must shoulder ethical responsibility, and collaborate and innovate with education institutions embracing reform, keeping to the bottom line—without developing and marketing products that allow do-for-you and induce dependence. They should actively adapt to the rules of education and growth, and build teenager-specific AI applications centered on inspiration, training, and creativity—so that technology for good truly takes root in teenagers’ growth.

Teenagers misusing AI to do things for you is not just a disciplinary issue like “cheating on homework” and “paper writing for you” that draws attention in social media friend circles. It is a major educational proposition about the foundations of growth for a whole generation. Government, schools, and families should move beyond shallow levels like whether something violates rules and how to prevent it; instead, they should stand at the height of safeguarding embodied and heart-engaged experiences, and cultivating free and whole people. They must reposition AI’s proper role in teenagers’ education.

Safetyism, social media, and carpenter thinking’s restraints on teenagers’ growth have already been criticized; the fourth experience blocker of misusing AI to do things for you requires even greater vigilance and timely course correction. In the AI era, for education to value embodied learning’s experiential practice and heart-engaged learning’s inner searching—so that the dedicated AI, designed again and again with prudence, strictly adheres to the educational positioning of “inspiration, training rather than do-for-you, and not replacing everything,” and blocks the vicious cycle of experience deprivation—only then can teenagers, through personal practice and genuine growth with heart, build independent spirit, innovation ability, and a complete personality. They can become a generation of “heart people” who can dance with technology without being driven and swept along, filled with a mission-driven longing, self-driven power, and a sense of real humanity.

About the author: Yang Bin, vice director of the Tsinghua University administrative affairs committee, professor at the School of Economics and Management and director of the Leadership Studies Center, and dean of the Institute for Sustainable Social Value at Tsinghua University. He previously served as vice president of Tsinghua University, dean of academic affairs, and dean of the graduate school, among other roles. Professor Yang Bin’s main research directions include organizational behavior and leadership, corporate ethics and social responsibility, and higher education management. He has authored Sudden Corporate Death, Strategic Rhythm, and In the Ming Ming De; he has also translated The Predicament and Reform of the University, The Right Way of Reform, and Managers, Not MBA. He developed and gives lectures on multiple signature courses at Tsinghua University, including Critical Thinking and Moral Reasoning, Leadership and Organizational Change, and Management Thinking.

Content source: iWeekly Weekend Pictorial

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