We need to teach children to interrogate everything. Not with anxiety, but with curiosity. To hold up a piece of information and turn it slowly in the light. To understand that a deepfake isn’t just a technical trick: it’s a weapon, and someone made it for a reason.

To ask not just ‘what does this say?’ but ‘what does this want from me?’

And we need to model this for them.

If the reasoning process becomes opaque even to those who are responsible for its consequences, accountability shifts from something lived to something theoretical.

Leaders may still sign off decisions, yet their capacity to interrogate the underlying thinking diminishes if they have no experiential sense of how that thinking was formed.

A comprehensive study published in the journal Societies sheds light on a concerning trend: that individuals aged 17–25 exhibit the highest reliance on AI tools and, correspondingly, the lowest scores in critical thinking assessments. The research indicates a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, underpinned by increased cognitive offloading.

As young adults delegate more cognitive tasks to AI, their capacity for independent analysis and problem-solving diminishes.