It feels as though a great flattening has come upon us, from several angles.

Tuesday’s edition of The Express featured a pair of dueling columns on the op-ed page, with syndicated Rich Lowry taking a business-oriented pro-artificial intelligence stance and a column by professor Wolfgang Messner from The Conversation taking a more philosophical stance in which he argued, among other things, that AI would lead to an embrace of mediocrity.

Over the last months, we have run a range of both articles and columns featuring various takes on AI and news of its continuing development — and the effects it has already had upon us.

Many teachers and professors, in particular, are sounding the alarm about students leaning on AI to complete their coursework as a substitute for learning the material themselves.

Charitably, one could argue this is always the future: that knowing how to use the tool is more important than the baseline thought. For example, knowing how to go to the grocery store and procure a tomato is more useful to most of us than knowing how to grow that tomato ourselves is. Or, for a different tack, that knowing how to use a computer to write is more important than writing by hand.

But those of us above a certain age remember the value in being taught the basics first; of truly mastering them before adopting the technological advances that trivialized the processes we just learned.

Perhaps we are moving into a world where, eventually, everyone’s personal AI companion will parse the world on their behalf and leave us to the higher functions of…something.

But that doesn’t seem to us to be living.

AI is too complicated of a topic for one editorial, but let’s add another subject while we are here: the renaming of our warships that celebrated various famous Americans.

News broke recently that Sec.Def Pete Hegseth is ordering the Navy to rename a ship known as the USNS Harvey Milk, which is named after a sailor who was a gay rights activist during the Korean War.

How many of you knew who Harvey Milk was? We’d wager not many.

He’s kind of interesting. Read up on him on Wikipedia or whatever your knowledge bank of choice is. The first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, he sponsored a bill to ban discrimination based on sexual discrimination in San Francisco, which passed 11-1. The one vote against ended up assassinating Milk.

We didn’t know any of this prior to the news breaking: that there was this ship, that it was named after this man, or that this man existed or what he did.

Some readers may take that as a signifier of the excess of diversity, equity and inclusion principles — and that is a defensible viewpoint.

Let us offer a different one, and loop back to our prior note about AI.

Both impulses — the intellectual numbing effect of AI and the expungement of some historical figures from public spaces — meet up at the crossroads of sameness.

Both lend to the viewpoint that nobody is special; that suburbian sprawl is the highest form of America, an endless ocean of carbon-copied houses, modest yards, BMWs, and shopping centers stretching interminably into the horizon.

Apologies if you have a BMW.

It is true that there can be freedom in anonymity and safety in going unnoticed. But, we would argue, that is also not the American way.

Our history is replete with ordinary people who — bootstraps notwithstanding — rose above their environment and did great things; who stood up, faced consequences, and are remembered for their accomplishments in spite of their challenges.

America has long lionized the children of immigrants, who came here with nothing. Americans — all of us — stand on the backs of civil rights leaders and suffragettes buried decades ago, many violently.

Who are tomorrow’s heroes? Are we moving towards a world where there won’t be any — a world of suffocating AI where human accomplishment is smothered and standing out is punished?

No.

We are not all the same, and that is a good thing.

Maybe we aren’t all globe-trotting titans. Perhaps we are fast food workers, or retail stockers; veterans or retirees; teachers or doctors or any of the other myriad expressions of humanity in 2025.

We all have our stories to tell and our own specialties where we excel. Every person has their moment.

One of our absolute favorite things about our jobs in the newsroom is hearing about somebody who accomplished something fascinating, getting to talk to them and then sharing their story — their passion — with our readers.

Perhaps you remember the grandmother who is a master painter — Sally Sample — or the former township supervisor who travels the world to crossbow tournaments — Denny Greenaway. What about the butterfly expert, Rick Mikula, who gave countless presentations locally? Or Sue Morris, whose knowledge about herbs and salves we’d stack up against anyone?

The list goes on and on and on.

All of these people, and more, are worth remembering and celebrating — and that’s just our tiny corner of the world.

Our American individualism — rugged or otherwise — is part of our core identity as a nation. We recommend resisting the impulse to discard the freedom to stand out in favor of the freedom to be like everyone else.