The Smartest Tool in History Is Making Our Kids Less Intelligent

There’s something that keeps me up at night.

Not about AI itself (I’m not here to wave a red flag about robots taking over).

I find AI genuinely exciting, and I believe it has the potential to be one of the most powerful tools humanity has ever created. But tools are only as good as the hands holding them. And right now, I’m watching a generation grow up who may not know how to hold this one properly.

Your kids are navigating something you and I never had to face. They’ve grown up with the answers to almost every question a fingertip away. They can ask AI to write their essay, summarise their reading, draft their email, explain a concept, even come up with the idea in the first place. And AI will do it. Cheerfully. Without complaint. Every single time.

Here’s the problem: brains are muscles. And muscles that don’t get used waste away.

The Lazy Brain Problem

I’m not calling your kids lazy…please don’t misread this. I’m saying that when we’re handed everything on a plate, most of us (adults included) stop reaching. Why wrestle with a problem when something else will solve it for you? Why sit in the discomfort of not knowing when you can just… ask?

‍The issue isn’t that AI is doing the work. It’s that when AI does the work, the thinking process never happens. And the thinking process is everything.

‍How do you learn to judge information if you’ve never had to weigh it yourself? How do you spot a lie if you’ve been handed ‘truth’ your whole life? How will your child, five years from now, in a meeting room or on a trading floor or in a courtroom, know which information to trust and which to throw in the bin if they’ve never had to make that call? If AI has always made it for them?

‍This matters enormously. Because AI isn’t always right. It hallucinates. It fabricates. It reflects the biases baked into the data it was trained on. A person who has never learned to question, to verify, to push back…they’ll swallow all of it whole, and that’s dangerous. Not because AI is malicious, but because an uncritical human using a powerful tool is a genuinely frightening thing.

‍It’s Not Just Critical Thinking, Either

‍I want to flag something else that doesn’t get talked about enough: communication.

Your kids are already communicating less. You know this. Texts replaced conversations. The emoji replaced the sentence. The voice note replaced the phone call. These aren’t generational quirks; they’re real skills eroding in real time. And now, on top of all of that, AI is writing for them too.

‍‍If a young person never has to find the words to explain what they think, to persuade someone, to argue a point, to navigate a difficult conversation, what happens when they have to? What happens when they land their first job and their manager asks them to present their reasoning? What happens when they need to disagree with someone, professionally, confidently, and with evidence? What happens when they can’t just paste in an AI answer and call it done?

‍I’ll tell you what will happen: they’ll flounder. Their confidence, already fragile in a world that constantly tells them they’re not enough, will take another hit.

‍So What Do We Actually Do?

‍I don’t believe in wringing my hands without offering a way forward.

‍The answer isn’t to ban AI. That’s like banning calculators because children should know their times tables. The answer is to teach children how to think alongside AI, not instead of it.

‍That starts with one word: why.

‍Not just ‘is this true?’ but ‘why does this exist?’ Who made this? Who benefits from me believing it? What is this piece of content trying to do to me? What would happen if it were wrong? These are the questions that turn passive consumers into active thinkers. These are the questions that build the kind of brain that AI cannot replace. AI can produce an answer, but it cannot produce genuine human discernment.

‍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. We need to say to them, ‘I don’t know, let’s work it out,’ rather than Googling in silence. We need to have the messy conversation at the dinner table. Let them see you being uncertain and working through it, because that process is what intelligence actually looks like. Not the answer at the end. The getting there.

Why I’ve Made It My Mission

‍‍I can’t bear the thought of a world full of dull-minded, pliable people who take whatever they’re handed because no one ever taught them to push back. I cannot bear the thought of the next generation entering the workforce unable to question a decision, challenge a brief, see through a sales pitch, or form an original thought without prompting.

‍Because that world doesn’t just produce ineffective workers; it produces people who can be led anywhere and told anything. Shaped by whoever shouts loudest or designs the most compelling algorithm.

‍I’m not being dramatic. That’s what’s coming if we don’t intervene now.

‍This is why everything I do at Evolve3 CIC is built around one idea: creating thinkers, not workers. People who can question, reason, evaluate and decide — not because they’ve been handed the skills on a PowerPoint slide, but because they’ve practised those skills until they become instinctive.

‍AI should be the thing that powers their thinking. The fuel, not the engine. The assistant, not the boss.

‍Right now, for a lot of young people, that relationship is backwards. And unless the adults in their lives, i.e the parents, teachers, employers, trainers, make a deliberate effort to flip it, it will stay backwards.

‍You don’t have to be an AI expert to have this conversation with your child; you just have to be curious. Ask them what they think. Ask them why. Ask them who told them that, and why that person might have said it. Ask them what they’d do if the AI were wrong.

‍Ask them to think.

‍Because the world they’re about to walk into needs them to.

‍Diane Hall is the founder of Evolve3 CIC, a West Yorkshire-based social enterprise on a mission to build critical thinkers across organisations and communities.

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