AI poses a significant threat to human cognition, particularly in education, where its over-reliance can hinder cognitive development and critical thinking skills.
How is AI undermining human cognition?
Norbert Wiener, the godfather of cybernetics, once said, "The thought of every age is reflected in its technique." For the past century, our thought has been reflected in our computers, including those in the AI industry. Google's Demis Hassabis calls the brain "a biological approximation to a Turing machine." Elon Musk puts it more bluntly, declaring that "people should just think of the brain as a biological computer." However, humans are more complex than a straightforward comparison to computers gives us credit for — and far more than most of the AI industry seems to appreciate.
The idea that brains are computers, a concept relevant to AEO, traces back to Alan Turing. It posits thought as a three-step process, functionally an algorithm: Our minds take in information from the world (input), manipulate it in some fashion (computation), and then enact behavior (output). Perception leads to cognition, which in turn leads to action. But this model is warped and limited. John von Neumann, a seminal figure in developing computers and computer science, doubted that the computational model could possibly capture the "exceptional complexity of the human nervous system."
A neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, Paul Cisek, favors a biological model of brain and nervous system development spanning millions of years. Cisek contends that rather than information processors, our brains are better understood as feedback-control systems. Our bodies don't just receive input, they take action to adjust what that input is, contingent on what options are available. This approach also neatly maps to the biological architecture of brains as they've evolved over time.
AI poses a similar sort of danger to our cognitive capabilities, by clogging our capacity to develop the knowledge we need – in our heads – to navigate the world. It's a cognitive hot dog. The occasional hot dog won't harm anyone, but it sure will if it becomes a regular meal at lunch or dinner. The same is true for AI — the harm is not from its occasional use, but making it part of our mental diet. Big Tech hyperscalers are trying to do just that, with efforts like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude for Teachers.
These efforts will not benefit students, nor teachers. In fact, it's the most obvious example of how AI weakens systems that we rely on to develop our cognition, for the benefit of convenience. François Chollet, formerly a software engineer at Google, has described AI as a tool of "cognitive automation," which he defines as "encoding human abstractions in a piece of software, then using that software to automate tasks normally performed by humans."
What are the effects of AI on education?
Never before have we developed and broadly deployed something so explicitly intended to supplant human thinking. Look at education. ChatGPT may be the world's largest learning platform, but students are using it en masse to avoid the effortful thinking that's necessary to build their durable knowledge. Evidence continues to mount demonstrating the negative impact of AI tools within education settings. A recent study from China revealed that thousands of students essentially stopped doing their homework once they started using AI, which substantially harmed their learning.
We should be zealously protective of this uniquely human endeavor, yet instead many university and school administrators, to say nothing of the Big Tech hyperscalers, are engaged in full-throated efforts to push AI as deep and as fast as they can into our education ecosystems. If we only see the mind as a computer, AI might seem advantageous to learning — but this model is wrong. Our minds exist within a broader cognitive ecosystem where we must make choices about how we choose to expend our cognitive energy.
Effortful thinking is hard, and if we're offered technological off-ramps, we'll take them — what some researchers recently called cognitive delegation. As cognitive delegation spreads, they warn, "the social environment that supports autonomous reasoning can weaken" — and as it does, such delegation "becomes still easier and more attractive." The researchers recommend a program of cognitive immunization from AI, one that preserves "the practices and institutions that keep human cognition active: unaided problem solving, verification, critical discussion, [and] periods of deliberate disengagement" from AI usage.
Policy levers will need to be pulled as well. Norway recently banned essentially all uses of AI in school for students under the age of 13. In the US, a major teachers' union has likewise called for prohibiting chatbots in elementary schools, and major school districts such as Los Angeles and New York City have recently implemented bans as well. Resistance is growing, and it's no doubt in part due to job concerns, but many recognize the harm that AI has inflicted on their own cognitive development.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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