These days, I teach at a university. A tragedy unfolds in my classroom. When I post a course announcement, thirty percent of the students don’t even click on it. Even after I’ve explained something three times, they sit there blinking as though they’ve never heard it before. They don’t even say they don’t understand. They just sit there.

As a teacher, the easiest way to get students to read announcements is to factor compliance with them into their participation grades. At the mention of grades, eyes that looked like frozen fish suddenly light up. A lazy professor uses grades as a weapon to make students do things they have no desire to do, and students attend class for their grades without finding much meaning or enjoyment in it. A tragedy.

In fact, there are few indicators as handy as grades for evaluating a person. As The Little Prince shows us, we adults really do love numbers and titles. Describe me as “Okdalto, who likes the Korean streamer Chimchakman, Undertale, and Chiikawa,” and people have no idea who I am. But describe me as “Okdalto, a PhD student at KAIST, a lecturer at Seoul National University, and an AI artist,” and only then do they applaud: well, what an impressive person.

Grades give us some idea not only of how well someone studied, but also of how diligent they are, how well they carry out assigned tasks, and how well they adapt to an organization’s rules. In a society where we can’t get to know every person individually, grades are a fairly convenient indicator. So they come in handy in all sorts of ways. They’re useful when applying for scholarships, entering graduate school, finding a job, and even when parents go to church and boast about their children.

It’s only natural, then, that students care so much about grades. I’ve spoken critically, but I don’t want to blame them. I myself have worked hard to accumulate grades, academic credentials, and career achievements. For someone like me to tell students not to worry about grades and instead enjoy learning would be a thoroughly privileged thing to say. We study to become useful people. We acquire more knowledge, develop better skills, and prove our abilities by earning better grades than others. Studying can be enjoyable, but even when it isn’t, it has a “use” that makes it something we have to do.

Yet machines have begun taking over, one by one, abilities that humans could acquire only through years of study and training. Solving math problems, writing code, drawing pictures, even writing papers. We are approaching an era in which AI can provide, much more cheaply and quickly, abilities that take humans years to develop. The economic value of the abilities we’ve worked so hard to acquire is changing.

Richard Feynman, a physicist I like, won the Nobel Prize. Well, what a remarkable award. But Feynman didn’t attach much significance to it. When he received a phone call in the early morning telling him he had won, he complained about being called at such an hour and hung up. He said he had already received his prize. For him, the pleasure of discovering and understanding the principles of nature was the reward. Whether anyone else recognized it or not, the very fact that he had figured something out made him happy.

I know that pleasure too. When a problem I’ve been thinking about for days finally yields, there’s a feeling that the world suddenly looks a little different. Something enjoyable is still enjoyable even if nobody notices, even if it never becomes a paper or earns any money. But there are many practical difficulties with asking everyone to live like Feynman. Students need grades, researchers need papers, and workers need income. However enjoyable discovery may be, that pleasure alone won’t pay the rent. We have to prove our usefulness and earn our living in return.

The development of AI will fundamentally change this way of life. If machines can provide far more efficiently the abilities humans have acquired through years of study and training, the usefulness humans need to produce themselves will gradually diminish. Until now, we have studied to become more useful people, but in the future, conditions will emerge that allow us to study regardless of usefulness. In fact, I feel that, to some extent, this has already happened; it’s a matter of degree.

An economic problem remains. No matter how much wealth AI produces, if a small minority monopolizes it, most people will still have to prove their worth to survive. We might even face a greater tragedy than today’s: human labor is no longer needed, yet people still have to earn their living expenses. Ultimately, how we share the abundance AI creates will become crucial.

If that problem, too, is resolved, and people no longer need to prove their usefulness to make a living, our attitudes toward learning and work will change considerably. Precisely because publishing a new theorem becomes meaningless, we can study mathematics purely for its own sake; precisely because we can live without selling our work, we can paint. We can keep doing what we love even if it brings us neither recognition nor money. Further economic rewards become meaningless. Then all that remains is meaning. The pleasure we feel while doing something becomes more important than the rewards we receive for doing it well.

Schools, too, will become very different from what they are today. Schools teach knowledge, but they also evaluate students’ abilities and rank them. Students study to earn good grades, enter good universities, and get good jobs. I take part in that process myself by assigning grades to my students. But if the role of cultivating capable workers and evaluating their abilities becomes meaningless, more of what remains in schools will be learning and teaching for their own sake. Students will come to class because they are truly curious and interested, rather than to earn good grades.

When that time comes, I won’t have to threaten students with grades as my weapon. There will be no reason to get angry because they haven’t read an announcement. They will have come because they want to learn, so I can simply talk with them about the things I find interesting. Just thinking about it makes me happy.

Of course, I don’t know whether universities will continue to exist at their current scale in a world with AI that advanced. Students will have fewer reasons to attend university, and universities will have fewer reasons to hire me as a lecturer. I even wonder whether it will take the form of employment at all.

Even so, discovering something new and turning it on its head is great fun. Teaching is no different. Even if grades become utterly useless, I think there will still be people who come to my lectures. There will still be people like me who enjoy learning for its own sake. There may just be fewer of them.

So perhaps this moment, as the need to prove our usefulness begins to disappear, is not a tragedy but a process of bringing tragedy to an end.