By Cheryl Kay Johnson
The title might be what grabbed your attention—something about whether tech is making us… well, less sharp. It’s a provocative question, certainly designed to spark thought. And it touches on a genuine anxiety many feel as technology, particularly AI, becomes more integrated into our lives and our learning environments.
Today, however, we’re not here just to debate the potential downsides. We’re here to flip the script. We’re going to explore how, with intention and smart design, these very tools—calculators, computers, the internet, and especially AI—can become powerful allies, not adversaries, in making our students and employees more capable, more creative, and more critically minded than ever before.
Think back: People worried that calculators would kill math skills, the internet would kill research skills. What actually happened? The tools changed how we apply those skills, freeing us up for higher-level thinking if we adapted strategically. We are at a similar inflection point with AI. Let’s explore a couple of solutions that might alleviate someone’s fear of technology, particularly AI.
Tech as an amplifier, not a replacement
Let’s explore how you can use technology strategically to amplify learning design. The key word here is “strategically.” It’s not about using tech for tech’s sake, but to achieve learning outcomes that are difficult or impossible with traditional methods alone.
Think about the evolution: from chalkboards to projectors, to computers in labs, to laptops, smartphones, and immersive realities. Each step offered new possibilities.
Instead of asking, “How can I put this lecture online?” ask, “How can technology enable learners to experience this concept? How can it provide personalized practice? How can it connect learners?”
The core principle is putting pedagogy first. What learning outcome do you want? Then, identify the technology that can best help you achieve it in a powerful, engaging, or efficient way. This moves us beyond basic information delivery to creating rich, interactive learning experiences.
Think about how you can use data from learning platforms. Analytics can show you where learners are struggling collectively or individually, allowing you to intervene effectively. This is data-driven instructional design in action.
Leveraging AI to cultivate essential future-ready skills
What are five of the critical job skills that will always be needed but are currently lacking in most learning programs?
- Creativity
- Problem-solving
- Teamwork
- Communication
- Resilience
Now let’s focus on AI, which brings unprecedented capabilities. The fear sometimes is that AI will do the skills for learners, making them passive. Our goal is the opposite: Use AI to create situations where learners actively develop these skills.
Let’s break down how AI can help cultivate those crucial future-ready skills:
Creative problem-solving:
- AI can act as a relentless brainstorming partner, offering diverse perspectives or challenging assumptions you might not have considered.
- Use AI to quickly generate complex scenarios or data sets for learners to analyze and find novel solutions.
- AI simulations can allow learners to test out creative solutions in a safe environment and see potential outcomes.
Example: Provide an AI with a complex business challenge or a scientific problem and ask learners to query the AI for different angles, potential roadblocks, or unusual approaches, then synthesize this into a proposed solution.
Teamwork & collaboration:
- AI can facilitate large-scale collaboration platforms, helping organize ideas or identify potential conflicts early (though use with caution regarding privacy and interpretation).
- Use AI to create simulated team members with different personalities or expertise for learners to practice collaborating with diverse perspectives.
- AI tools can analyze communication patterns in group text discussions (anonymously, with consent!) and provide feedback to the group on balance of participation or clarity, helping them improve their collaborative process.
Example: Learners work in groups on a project, using an AI tool that helps organize shared research notes and provides prompts to ensure all team members are contributing equally or addressing different facets of the problem.
Communication:
- AI chatbots or virtual agents can provide infinite practice partners for practicing presentations, sales pitches, difficult conversations (e.g., performance reviews in corporate, or debates in academic).
- Learners can write emails, reports, or essays and use AI tools for feedback on clarity, tone, structure, or conciseness before submitting or sending.
- AI can simulate conversations with diverse audiences, helping learners adapt their communication style.
Example: A corporate learner practices delivering feedback to a difficult “virtual employee” AI, receiving feedback on their language and approach. An academic student practices explaining a complex scientific concept to an AI programmed to act like a layperson.
Resilience:
- AI can power simulations where learners face setbacks, failures, or unexpected challenges in a low-stakes environment. The AI provides consistent feedback, prompting reflection on why something didn’t work and encouraging iteration.
- AI can help learners identify patterns in their own work habits or emotional responses based on data they choose to share (e.g., calendar data + self-reported stress levels), providing personalized insights and suggesting coping strategies or resources.
- AI tools can offer access to mindfulness exercises or motivational prompts based on user preference. (Important: Frame AI as a tool for practice and access to resources, not a therapist).
Example: In a project simulation, a learner’s proposed solution fails. The AI guides them through analyzing the failure points (“Tell me why you think that didn’t work.” “What variable did you not account for?”) and encourages them to try a modified approach.
The key is that AI provides personalized, scalable, and often immediate opportunities for practice and feedback in complex skill areas that were previously hard to train effectively. It allows learners to do, fail safely, reflect, and try again.
AI as your Socratic partner
AI can facilitate deep critical thinking, specifically through Socratic techniques. The Socratic method, at its heart, is about asking probing questions to stimulate thought, expose assumptions, and guide someone towards their own understanding.
Traditionally, this requires a skilled human facilitator and is difficult to scale. AI changes this.
How can we implement AI-powered Socratic approaches?
- AI as a Persistent Questioner: Design AI prompts or chatbots that are programmed to always respond with a question that pushes the learner’s thinking. “Okay, you said X. What evidence supports X?” “What are the potential counterarguments to that?” “How would that apply in a different context?”
- AI for Exploring Multiple Perspectives: Present a case study or problem to an AI and ask it to articulate the viewpoints of different stakeholders. Learners then have to analyze and critique these AI-generated perspectives.
- AI for Challenging Assumptions: Design AI interactions that identify implicit assumptions in a learner’s statement and directly challenge them, forcing the learner to articulate their underlying beliefs.
- AI for Justifying Reasoning: Ask learners to explain their step-by-step reasoning to an AI, which is programmed to ask “Why?” at each step, demanding explicit justification.
- Simulating Debates: AI can be programmed to argue a specific side of an issue, requiring learners to engage in a simulated debate, constructing arguments and refuting points.
- Focus on the Meta Level: After an AI-Socratic interaction, the human facilitator brings the learners together to discuss how the AI questioning worked, what they found challenging, and how they could apply similar questioning to their own thinking in the future. The AI facilitates the practice; the human facilitates the learning about critical thinking.
This isn’t about the AI having critical thinking; it’s about the AI being a tool that prompts and requires critical thinking from the learner. The AI provides the stimulus—the challenging question, the alternative perspective, the demand for justification. The learner provides the cognitive effort.
This approach helps learners move beyond surface-level understanding to analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, and applying knowledge—the hallmarks of deep critical thinking.
From fear to empowerment
So, looping back to our opening question: Does technology make people dumb? Our exploration today suggests that the answer isn’t a simple yes or no based on the technology itself. It depends on how we choose to use it.
If we use it passively, merely consuming information or letting tools do our thinking for us, there’s a risk of cognitive atrophy. But if we use it actively, strategically, and pedagogically—as an amplifier for experience, a partner in skill-building, and a tireless Socratic questioner—then technology, including AI, becomes a powerful engine for enhanced learning, future-ready skills, and deep critical thinking.
Your role, as learning professionals, is more critical than ever. You are the architects who design these interactions, the guides who facilitate the learning journey alongside the technology. Embrace these tools, experiment ethically, and focus on designing for the human skills that technology can help us elevate.
Using technology provides an unprecedented opportunity to make learning smarter, deeper, and more human-centric than ever before. Embrace the challenge!
Image credit: AndreyPopov
