S8E2 - When AI does the thinking, how do young people learn to be critical thinkers? The urgent warning for those under 25.

What happens to a generation growing up with AI always on hand to do the thinking for them?

That question sits at the heart of this episode, and few people are better placed to answer it than Tim Cook, an elementary school teacher in Amman, Jordan, who has spent over a decade in international classrooms across five countries.

Tim writes the Algorithmic Mind column for Psychology Today, and his research on cognitive offloading and child development has been making waves well beyond the education sector.

In Andrew's book Digitally Curious, he argues that curiosity and critical thinking are the most important skills in an AI-powered world.

Tim's work takes that further, asking a harder and more urgent question: what if the generation now entering school never develops those skills in the first place?

In this episode

• The classroom as laboratory. Tim has been noticing a shift in children's relationship with struggle for most of a decade. well before AI arrived.
  
  
• Cognitive atrophy versus cognitive foreclosure. An adult who offloads tasks to AI is atrophying a muscle they already built — it can be rebuilt. A child who offloads a task they have never learned is foreclosing a developmental pathway that may never form. 
  
  
• The homogenisation problem. When a health teacher set a creative writing task designed to be AI-proof, 80% of students submitted the same Mission Impossible-style hero's journey narrative.
  
  
• The AI audit problem. To check AI output, you need domain expertise. But a child is still supposed to be building that expertise. You cannot audit what you do not yet understand — and so the substitution becomes foreclosure.
  
  
• AI as provocateur, not thinking partner. The goal is to use AI to surface your own expertise, not to let it generate the thesis.
  
  
• Cognitive Privacy. Tim introduces his Cognitive Privacy Project: AI is the first tool in human history to collect our cognitive behavioural data.

Resources

• Tim Cook's Psychology Today column — The Algorithmic Mind
• Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them — Tim Cook, Psychology Today, March 2026
  
  

Thanks for listening to Digitally Curious. You can buy the book that showcases these episodes at curious.click/order

Your Host is Actionable Futurist® Andrew Grill

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