I must be honest from the start, since none of what follows works if I am not.
I feel overwhelmed by what AI can already do, more than I would like to admit. I feel a similar overwhelm scrolling through LinkedIn, the news, blogs, and countless other platforms, where a constant stream of people declares that everything is different now, that entire professions are already obsolete, that keeping up is no longer optional. More than once, on the harder days, I have caught myself thinking about retirement, still genuinely far off, as though it were an exit rather than a decision.
Alfred Adler would probably say I am having an inferiority experience. He argued that feeling inadequate next to something more capable than us is not a problem to be solved. It is the starting condition of being a person who is still growing, and what matters is how we respond to that feeling next.
AI generates exactly that experience for students, and most conversation about it treats students as the whole story: what they are learning, how they are coping, whether they are outsourcing judgment they have not yet built. That is real and worth taking seriously, but it is only one of three levels where the same dynamic plays out, and the other two (faculty and institutions) get talked about far less.
The student
A compiler error, a failing test, an AI tool that produces something better than the student could have written on their own. All of it is a version of the same inferiority experience: something more capable than us, standing right where we are trying to learn.
The response can go two ways. The student lets the AI resolve the discomfort by delegating judgment before they have built any. Or the student sits inside the discomfort long enough for it to become the raw material of actual learning.
Classroom design should focus on structuring that choice well. This includes treating failure as something to document and learn from rather than penalize, building in checkpoints that ask for evidence rather than a passing grade, and giving students enough real struggle before AI enters the picture that they have something of their own to evaluate it against.
The faculty
What gets skipped is that faculty are having a version of the same experience, not administering it from some position above the reckoning.
A professor watching a model do in seconds something that took years of training to do well is having exactly that experience, just wearing a faculty badge instead of a student ID. The same unproductive responses show up, dressed differently.
Dismissal: "AI can’t replace good teaching", which can be true and can also be a way of protecting a sense of professional standing without examining it too closely. Overcorrection: handing course design and assessment over to AI entirely, abandoning exactly the judgment that used to define the job. And a third response, quieter and harder to name: simply wondering whether the whole project still makes sense.
That third one is the one behind the retirement thought I mentioned at the start. Adler would probably call it resignation dressed as pragmatism: "what is the point of teaching this when the machine already does it", except I am the one saying it to myself instead of hearing a student say it to me.
The productive response, from the faculty side, is probably simpler than it sounds: name the feeling instead of hiding it, and put the effort where AI cannot go, into judgment, framing, and actually knowing the people in front of us, rather than trying to outcompete a tool at the parts it already does well.
The institution
There is a third level underneath both of these, and it is the one universities rarely examine directly: whether the culture around us makes the productive response more available, or makes the defensive one feel like the only sane choice.
A university that rewards visible output and quietly stigmatizes struggle or failure is, without anyone intending it, cultivating exactly the neurotic responses in its own faculty that it claims to worry about in students. Psychological safety is not a wellness initiative in this framing. It is the actual precondition for anyone, student, professor, or institution, choosing growth over defense when the ground shifts under them.
The response, at this level, is mostly a matter of what gets rewarded: crediting honest accounts of failure and uncertainty rather than only polished results, giving people room to be visibly early in adopting something new without treating that as a weakness, and building enough shared trust that admitting "I do not know how to handle this yet" reads as ordinary rather than as a risk to someone’s standing.
What to do with it
I do not have a solution to offer here, for myself or for anyone else feeling some version of the same thing at any of these three levels.
The overwhelm is not evidence that something has gone wrong personally. It is the ordinary, universal shape of encountering something larger than ourselves currently are. The question was never whether to feel it. It is what we choose to do with it, today, and probably again tomorrow.
It is worth thinking about it…