ALT The University of Edinburgh will graduate its first cohort in 2026 who never wrote an undergraduate essay without AI assistance. Not because they cheated, by second year, nobody was calling it cheating anymore. By third year, the university stopped pretending to care. By finals, the conversation shifted from “how do we detect this” to “how do we assess what we actually value” before dying quietly because nobody could agree on what that was. Those graduates enter a job market with the same problem. They produce flawless reports, compelling presentations, sophisticated analysis of whatever you put in front of them. What they can’t do is think without the autocomplete. Not because they’re stupid, but because they never built the cognitive infrastructure that turns writing from performance into discovery. They never learned that writing is the tool you use to find out what you think, because the algorithm was always there to tell them what comes next.