Once again, people are wringing their hands about a new technology making us stupid. Not so long ago, Nicholas Carr was asking whether Google was making us stupid. Now people say AI is making students stupid.
It’s nothing new. The fear goes back at least to ancient Greece. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates warns that writing will weaken memory and give people the appearance of wisdom without genuine understanding. The irony, of course, is that we know this because Plato wrote it down.
Socrates identified a real danger that applies just as well to AI: we can mistake access to knowledge for knowledge itself. But writing did not make us stupid, nor did Google. Each changed how we think and forced us to develop new intellectual skills, and AI will do the same. The question is not whether students use AI, but whether they use it to avoid thinking or to think further.
Last Updated on September 3, 2026 | Published: September 3, 2026