Beyond the Degree

Ten Years Ago, Musk Warned We Were Summoning a Demon.

In 2014, AI was still science fiction. Now, students co-write with chatbots faster than they can outline — proof of how quietly everything changed.

Styled photograph of diverse students in a 2010 computer lab on a college campus. [Conceptualized by

Dave Hallmon

, ]. Midjourney.com, 2025.

You’ll get to watch a dozen tech trends blow through your classroom when you have taught for nearly two decades. But a decade ago, artificial intelligence was still more Netflix’s Black Mirror than Blackboard — more summer blockbuster than syllabus. AI lived in science fiction, in shows like Person of Interest, and physicists’ warnings that felt distant and dramatic.

Phones were banned in class. ChatGPT didn’t exist. When someone said “AI,” most of us thought of Siri mispronouncing our names or of some movie where robots snapped.

A few voices, though — voices we now recognize as prophets, pioneers, or platform builders — were already trying to tell us: the scripts were inching closer to reality.

Now, in 2025, one of those voices has gone silent. Two of the leading companies are worth hundreds of billions. One still urges caution. As an adjunct, I grade essays co-written by the very tools they warned us about in 2014 all the time. Nearly one in five high schoolers now leans on…