WORK
Appiah's Atlantic Essay on AI
Appiah's autumn 2025 essay in The Atlantic observing that AI anxiety has shifted from apocalypse to atrophy and challenging readers to develop the skill of knowing which skills matter.
In the autumn of 2025, Kwame Anthony Appiah published an essay in The Atlantic that became his most direct public engagement with the AI transition. The essay begins with a quiet observation: artificial intelligence had moved from the miraculous to the taken-for-granted, and the anxiety surrounding it had shifted accordingly — 'from apocalypse to atrophy.' The fear was no longer primarily about killer robots but about what AI does to the human capacities it replaces. Teachers, Appiah notes, 'are beginning to see the rot' as students outsource thinking to machines. But Appiah refuses to let either triumphalism or despair dominate. Not all de-skilling is the same. Some skills that atrophy were never worth preserving. Others that atrophy are genuinely precious. The essay closes with the formulation that serves as the compass for this entire simulated book: 'If there's one skill we can't afford to lose, it's the skill of knowing which of them matter.'
