It has never been easier to graduate from America’s top university without doing any serious thinking. You can upload all your readings, and a pre-digested version will be spoon-fed to you. Your half-baked, error-laden thoughts can be instantaneously converted into a polished, submittable product. You can even throw together a ChatGPT-generated ChatGPT wrapper with an equally artificial slide deck to pitch a startup to a venture capitalist, and maybe you’ll be the next Silicon Valley celebrity. While you’re at it, why don’t you let the Gale-Shapley algorithm solve your stable marriage problem? 

We fear that as advancement without achievement is becoming possible, Stanford students are falling into a crisis of ambition. Our grand dreams for personal success are not matched by equally big-picture thinking about the impact that we could make on the world. 

Stanford’s official engineering ethos has four tenets: problem solving, creativity, entrepreneurship and adaptation to change. We fear that as we buy into entrepreneurship culture, we have become unrooted from the desire for problem-solving and creativity that underlie all transformative innovations. We want to have buzzworthy projects listed on our websites, so we cultivate resources and connections in well-established fields before considering what distinctive skills we might acquire and what challenging, pressing problems are most worth dedicating our lives to. We are so impatient and risk-averse that we would rather provide trivial corporate or software services than save lives. 

We could blame individuals for valuing advancement over achievement, but that’s an inevitable result of a culture that confers respect and esteem upon those occupying certain cherished positions, emphasizing status over any specific contribution (Think: When we hear CEO, how often do we stop to question whether they were an effective CEO before we are instinctively impressed?). What Stanford needs is a collective cultural shift to hold one another to a higher standard. 

As large language models boost our productivity, we have two paths before us: to unlock new, substantive possibilities or to get the same outputs as before for less effort. Too often, consistent with an emphasis on empty entrepreneurship over problem-solving and creativity, we use these tools merely to reduce our workloads. There are plenty of use cases for cutting-edge computer technology that compile unstructured data, complete busywork and enhance human skills. But, even as some researchers are using machine-generated code with deep subject matter expertise to synthesize life-saving drugs, instead, we build yet another next-token prediction tool, hoping it’s funnier or prettier than the last one. 

Taking true risk is scary, but solving big problems is almost always a risk — it requires years of dedication to a path that might turn out to be a dead end. It is much easier to take a pseudo-risk that garners social clout. We “drop out” (but only for a quarter or two) to build in bubbles we already know starry-eyed investors will pay good money for. We take the hard-looking classes everyone else in our major is taking because it feigns courage, yet we rarely take electives in unfamiliar fields because the risk of a course being “useless” to our career is too much to handle. 

In an ecosystem that produces such strong incentives to trace the well-beaten path, it is not surprising that, as both producers and consumers of innovation, we increasingly use technology to make easy lives easier rather than solving meaningful problems. The latter would require us to go through the arduous path of reflecting on ourselves and the world we inhabit, and identify what problems are worth solving, whether big or small, whether personal or impersonal. That’s not a choice that any online tool can make for you. You, as an individual, must choose to learn difficult skills and graduate with rigor and integrity. You must choose to confront looming issues like world hunger and climate change. To buckle under the pressure of having a glamorous title or a high GPA is easy, but it is not what innovators do. 

We have an obligation to society to be intentional in the mountains we climb and the routes we take. If we of all people do not use our positioning as young, ambitious, Stanford students to figure out how to make a living while solving a daunting problem, how can we expect anyone else to do so in our place? We must be ambitious enough to reinvest the leisure that technology has won for us back into the pursuit of uplifting humanity over uplifting personal status. But even more, we owe this obligation to ourselves. No matter what happens, isn’t it worth more than a million low-hanging fruits to know that you tried?