AI, Fermat, and the Fallacy of the WALL-E Future

The Real Business Value of “Boring” Intelligence

Part 2 of “In the Illusion of Thinking” Series

In my last post, I pushed back on the idea that AI needs to be “smart” to be useful. I argued that it doesn’t have to solve the Tower of Hanoi or ace a trigonometry proof to deliver business value. That argument still stands.

But let’s go deeper.

Because as Apple’s The Illusion of Thinking paper points out, LLMs struggle with abstract reasoning. They can’t prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, and likely never will. And that’s exactly the point.

What worries me isn’t that AI can’t match Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat.

What worries me is that we might stop trying.

WALL-E, Fermat, and the Value of Effort

In one of my favorite dystopian movies, Pixar’s WALL-E, humanity gives up thinking and moving. Machines carry us. Screens feed us. Everything is automated. No one solves anything—they consume, consume and get universally fat.

Contrast that with Wiles’ 1994 proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem: 350 years of failed attempts, hundreds of mathematicians, and an eventual breakthrough powered by persistence, new thinking, and a global community of solvers.

Fermat didn’t make us lazy. He made us reach.
AI, if misapplied, risks doing the opposite.

The Business Reality: “Boring” AI Works

Now, let’s come back to reality—because this is where the opportunity lives.

In the enterprise, AI doesn’t need to be a genius. It needs to do work like:

• Routing tickets more efficiently
• Classifying threats in real time
• Compressing alerts into actionable summaries
• Recommending the next best action in the sales cycle
• Prioritizing cloud access based on performance metrics

This isn’t sexy. It’s not solving unsolved math problems. But it’s delivering ROI—measurable, repeatable, and scalable.

Infrastructure Still Matters (Maybe More Than Ever)

That’s where Aryaka comes in. Because “boring AI” still has requirements:

• It needs fast, reliable, secure access to distributed data and cloud models
• It needs consistent performance across hybrid and multi-cloud environments
• It needs observability, policy enforcement, and zero-trust security at scale

If you want your AI to act—whether it’s filtering logs or flagging anomalies—your network can’t be passive. It needs to be smart enough to keep up.

Unified SASE as a Service helps make that real. Not by solving riddles, but by removing roadblocks. It delivers the performance, agility, simplicity, and security that AI-enhanced enterprises demand

The Illusion Isn’t AI—It’s Complacency

So yes, LLMs might fail at Fermat. (or, as I my son pointed out at proving that

We’re entering an era where the question isn’t whether AI is “smart enough”—but whether we use it wisely enough to stay sharp ourselves.

The danger isn’t that AI takes over. It’s that we stop asking big questions and start letting average answers slide.

The Takeaway

If you want to win with AI:

• Don’t wait for magic.
• Don’t chase moonshots.
• And above all—don’t let go of the human effort to think deeply, challenge assumptions, and drive meaningful change.

Because unlike the passengers in WALL-E, your business doesn’t get to coast.
And unlike Fermat’s challengers, you don’t have centuries to figure it out.

So yes—there’s a bit of irony here.

I asked an AI to help write this.
Not because I couldn’t. But because I had something to say—and this helped me say it better, and faster!

That’s the kind of partnership AI should enable:
Not replacing human insight but amplifying and accelerating it.

Let’s build on that together.

Ready to make your AI real?

Let’s talk about how your network can be the launchpad, not the limiter. Contact Aryaka and we’ll help you explore the benefits of our AI-powered solutions for your networking and security convergence.