An academic warns that reliance on AI risks creating a “subcognitive society,” stripping students of the basic thinking skills needed to understand their world or participate in democracy. Dr Anastasia Berg, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine, argues that widespread AI use in education undermines fundamental cognitive fluency, going far beyond concerns about cheating or specialised academic skills, reports The New York Times.
Dr Berg described her growing dread after discovering widespread AI use among students submitting final exams, highlighting a deeper problem articulated by a colleague: “Our students are about to turn subcognitive,” the colleague said.
“At stake are not just specialised academic skills or refined habits of mind, but also the most basic form of cognitive fluency,” Dr Berg said. She argues that developing linguistic capacities – mastering concepts, following arguments, forming judgments – is inseparable from developing the capacity to think itself. “For us human beings, using language is not a skill like any other — it is the way we do almost anything at all,” she wrote.
Pernicious for developing minds
While acknowledging that technologies like writing itself once raised similar concerns (citing Plato’s warning that literacy would harm memory), Dr Berg argues the threat from AI is more fundamental. She contends that even seemingly “innocent auxiliary functions” like using AI for summarising are “the most pernicious for developing minds”.
“Letting A.I. take over this rote task seems like a harmless shortcut,” she noted, but argued that the ability to determine what is being argued and how “is not dispensable. No aspect of cognitive understanding is perfunctory.”
Without practising these skills, Dr Berg fears young people will struggle to understand news reports, medical documents, or the merit of an argument. “A depleted conceptual reservoir would render our lives crude and our experience of the world undifferentiated and coarse,” she warned. “Worst of all, cognitive degradation threatens our claim to self-rule: It is far from obvious that the denizens of the subcognitive society would be fit to participate in the democratic processes…”
Dr Berg strongly contested the idea, voiced by some educators like Princeton’s D. Graham Burnett, that widespread AI use is inevitable and makes traditional literacy obsolete outside elite institutions. “I bristle at Dr. Burnett’s blithe consignment of the majority of American college students to an education that seems better fit for kindergartners,” she wrote, asserting that many students can and want to engage deeply with texts.
She concluded by urging educators to take action. “Higher education aims to create cognitively mature adults, which in turn requires us to ensure students learn to read, think and write all on their own,” Dr Berg stated. “Creating tech-free spaces and incentivising students to spend time in them requires no new resources. All it takes is will.”
