What Is AI Doing to Us?

A Philosophical Inquiry into Learning, Thinking, and Being

Drawing on Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, the authors trace how systematic thinking undermines the uncertainty and temporal complexity that make learning genuinely human.

When ChatGPT arrived, the authors responded as educators do, establishing policies, frameworks, and workshops. Everything looked right. Nothing felt adequate. That persistent unease became the starting point for What Is AI Doing to Us?, a philosophical inquiry into what artificial intelligence reveals about learning, thinking, and being. What came to light was unsettling. AI wasn’t disrupting education; it was revealing what education had already become. Decades of well-intentioned improvements had quietly converted the struggle that builds understanding into procedures that algorithms could execute. We had all been preparing the ground for our own replacement. The question could no lon