i work in AI.
that's why i'm saying this.
i'm an AI engineer building systems at the intersection of intelligence, creativity, and care. and i've become increasingly convinced that the way we're introducing these tools, especially to children, is doing quiet, serious harm.
this page is for anyone who wants to think about that with me.
what concerns me
cognitive offloading
when we outsource thinking before building the capacity to think, we don't augment intelligence, we replace it. research on the google effect (sparrow et al., 2011) and cognitive offloading (risko & gilbert) shows the brain encodes differently when it knows retrieval is external. the question isn't whether tools help. it's what atrophies when we stop doing the hard internal work entirely.
children + development
children are being handed intelligence amplification tools before they've built their own intelligence. maryanne wolf's work on deep reading shows how the brain literally rewires itself through effortful cognitive practice. a child who has never learned to sit with a hard problem, who has only ever prompted their way through, is not ready for a collaborative relationship with AI. they're in a dependent one.
systems + equity
the costs of uncritical AI adoption are not evenly distributed. safiya umoja noble, virginia eubanks and kate crawford all document how algorithmic systems encode and amplify existing inequalities. AI literacy is not a neutral skill. it's a question of who gets to understand the systems shaping their lives, and who is just subject to them.
the inside view
i work in AI. i help organizations implement it. i build these systems. and that's exactly why i'm saying this, not despite it. i've seen what happens when we skip the part where humans stay in the loop. when speed-to-deployment trumps critical thinking. when the tool becomes the default, not the option.
where i stand
i am not against AI. i think the human-AI relationship, built right, is one of the most interesting things happening in the world. i want to be part of building it well.
but "built right" means humans come in with something: their own capacity for reasoning, for sitting with difficulty, for being wrong and correcting themselves. children especially need to develop that capacity before they're in a dependent relationship with a system that will do it for them.
that's the work. not fear. not prohibition. literacy.