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?
What We Cover
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. In 2014, a boat-building exercise produced chaos, creativity, and resilience. The same exercise last year saw 50% of students reach straight for their iPads.
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. As Tim writes in Psychology Today: “You can’t atrophy a muscle that was never built.”
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. Tim tested it himself, opened ChatGPT, and got precisely that story on the first prompt. When every student thinks through the same model, the classroom loses its variance — and a workforce without variance has a single point of failure.
Michael Gerlich’s research. Tim references Gerlich’s 2025 study showing a significant negative correlation (r = −0.68, p < 0.001) between AI reliance and critical thinking scores. The worst effects fell on the 17–25 age group. The group maintaining the highest critical thinking scores, regardless of AI use, was the 46-and-over cohort — because they were offloading tasks they already knew how to do.
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. Tim rejects the term “thinking partner” because it implies equal collaboration. He prefers thinking catalyst. The goal is to use AI to surface your own expertise, not to let it generate the thesis. His analogy is crisp: if you went to the store for grey trousers, get the grey trousers and leave.
The institutional response. Tim is critical of schools that ban AI for students while professors automate their grading, and of EdTech companies selling “personalised learning” when they mean “personalised content delivery.” Knowing a child’s reading level is not the same as knowing the child.
Cognitive Privacy. Tim introduces his Cognitive Privacy Project: AI is the first tool in human history to collect our cognitive behavioural data — not just nouns like addresses, but verbs: our reasoning, our synthesis, our judgement. The inferences a behavioural algorithm draws from your prompts are not protected by law. They belong to the company.
Related Episodes
This conversation connects directly to Andrew’s earlier episodes with human rights lawyer and author Dr Susie Alegre:
🎧 S4E24 — Freedom to Think with Susie Alegre — podc.st/s4e24
Recorded in 2022, exploring how digital surveillance and algorithmic systems already threaten our most fundamental human right: the freedom of thought.🎧 S5E12 — Susie Alegre on Generative AI, ChatGPT and the Freedom to Think — podc.st/s5e12
A 2023 update in which Susie examines what ChatGPT means for cognitive autonomy. Tim mentioned he had listened to this episode before recording and his immediate instinct was: apply the same framework Susie applies to social media to AI, and you get the same warning signs.
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
When Students Outsource Thinking to AI, Brains Pay the Price — Tim Cook, Psychology Today, August 2025
Why Kids Find Cognitive Offloading Irresistible — Tim Cook, Psychology Today, December 2025
AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking — Michael Gerlich, Societies, 2025
Thanks for listening to Digitally Curious. You can buy the book that showcases these episodes at curious.click/order
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