If AI does all the thinking, how do young people develop the skills they need to survive in the workplace? I’m asked about this all the time at my keynotes, so being incredibly curious, I went in search of the answer.
One intelligent voice on this is Timothy Cook, and I interviewed him for the latest episode of the Digitally Curious podcast.
So what if AI isn’t just changing how children learn, it may be deciding whether they learn to think at all?
Tim brings a unique perspective. He is an elementary school teacher in Amman, Jordan, a Psychology Today columnist, and one of the clearest thinkers I have encountered on the intersection of AI and child development.
He introduced me to a distinction I have not been able to stop thinking about.
❓Cognitive atrophy versus cognitive foreclosure.
An adult who offloads tasks to AI is weakening a muscle they already built. It weakens, but it can be rebuilt. A child who offloads a task they have never learned is foreclosing a developmental pathway that may never form.
The downside of adult offloading is that people get less sharp. The downside of children growing up delegating to AI is a generation that was never sharp to begin with.
Tim references Michael Gerlich’s 2025 study, which found a negative correlation between AI reliance and critical thinking, with the worst effects falling on the 17–25 age group.
Not because they are less intelligent, but because the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until 25, and the neural pathways for reasoning may never form if they are outsourced before they are built.
We also explore the homogenisation problem. When a teacher set a creative writing task deliberately designed to be AI-proof, 80% of students submitted the same hero’s journey narrative.
Tim tested it. ChatGPT delivered the same story.
When everyone uses the same model, variance collapses, and a workforce without it has a single point of failure. This is the root cause of AI slop today, or “the magnet of mediocrity”.
This episode connects directly to my earlier podcast episodes with human rights lawyer Dr Susie Alegre on the freedom to think.
Tim told me he had listened to those episodes before we sat down, and his immediate thought was: apply the same alarm signals Susie raises about social media to AI, and you get the same warning.
In my book Digitally Curious, I argue that curiosity and critical thinking are the most important skills in an AI world. Tim’s work asks what happens when we never build those skills in the first place.
The signal is already there. He argues we should not wait for a generation of proof.
🚨 If you’re under 25 or have children who are, then you need to listen to this episode.
🎧 Grab the interview at podc.st/s8e2 or search for Digitally Curious wherever you get your podcasts.
