A bit of pathos in the morning. Once I was in a small village on Lake Baikal. There I saw a village school that a single convict had built out of gigantic logs back at the beginning of the century. Once I was in the Humanist Library in Sélestat. Leaning over a glass display case, I was reading the diaries of Beatus Rhenanus, the man who wrote “Rerum Germanicarum libri tres” and left behind the only intact library from the Renaissance, now included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. The only thing these people have in common is a certain degree of intellectual solitude and some almost fantastic love of spreading knowledge. One more thought. Anyone who has ever done fundamental research knows how hard it is to reach the research frontier: bachelor’s, master’s, PhD, postdoc — years and years of intense work, literally at the limits of human capabilities. Among other things, it is also very expensive. For society, producing human experts is very, very expensive. In the age of AI, this problem will, of course, be solved radically. Why do we need human experts at all? Why do we need this terribly expensive, inefficient, and complicated social construct called academic science? Naturally, it will disappear, simply for economic reasons. There is absolutely no point in working so hard. Already now, everywhere you turn, you hear: “Don’t read the text, you can’t produce a summary better or faster than AI”, “Don’t read the code”, “Don’t study the subject”, “Your meat brains are obsolete”, “The proof of this theorem has been formalized in Lean4, trust us, there is no point in checking it yourself”, “You’re a Luddite”, “You’re a dinosaur”, “You’re fighting progress, and progress is inevitable”, “You’ll be left behind”, “You’re slow”. But I am sure that even in this new Middle Ages, there will be people who will try to understand everything, all the way down, in all its fullness. Maybe one in a thousand. Maybe one in a million. “Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen” will always be their motto.