University of Tartu professor Piirimäe: intellectual laziness is eroding society

European intellectual history professor Pärtel Piirimäe from the University of Tartu warns that excessive use of technology and the comfort instinct lead to intellectual laziness. In his view, people are increasingly delegating their language skills and thinking abilities to machines. This threat could lead to an intellectual aristocracy, where only a narrow elite has the capacity and desire to think.

European intellectual history professor Pärtel Piirimäe from the University of Tartu raises a sharp question: what happens to society when people stop thinking? According to the professor, the threat is real and growing-overuse of technology and the daily pursuit of convenience lead to a situation where the brain simply isn't being strained enough.

Piirimäe sees an increasingly clear trend where people entrust machines with their most fundamental human qualities: language skills and thinking ability. This is not merely a personal choice but has broader social consequences. When a large portion of the population abandons deep thinking, the entire intellectual fabric of society begins to thin.

The threat of intellectual aristocracy

Most troubling for the professor is a scenario where, in the longer term, only a narrow elite remains who values and pursues thinking for its own sake. A kind of intellectual aristocracy emerges-a society where intellectual capacity is concentrated in few hands and the majority lives increasingly in a machine-mediated reality.

Piirimäe raises this problem in a broader context: thinking is not simply a personal pleasure but the foundation of a democratic society. The ability of citizens to deliberate, weigh arguments, and make independent decisions is what keeps a free society vital. If this ability becomes dull, democracy itself becomes fragile.

What should society do?

The professor's message is a clear call to awareness: the use of technology in itself is not the problem-the question is how and why we use it. A thoughtful person should distinguish between a situation where a machine helps them and a situation where a machine thinks for them. In the latter case, we lose something irreplaceable.