AI researcher + coiner of 'cognitive surrender'. @KingsCollegeLon @Wharton @UMich @WesternU Audiophile, film buff. Living slowly, nonlinearly. #goblue
London, England
Joined January 2018
- Tweets184
- Following523
- Followers195
- Likes807
💯
The future of #ArtificialIntelligence is not pre-determined. As a technology developed by human beings, its future depends on the choices we make. We therefore have the responsibility to guide, change and, when necessary, reject its applications. A reliable system that serves the human person is of greater value than one that is exceptionally powerful but whose consequences cannot be adequately foreseen or controlled.
Steven Shaw retweeted
Accepting AI’s answers without questioning them? @Wharton’s @GidiN and Steven Shaw call it “cognitive surrender.”
In their experiments, participants accepted AI’s wrong answers over 80% of the time after consulting it.
🎨: @marissashandell (Research Doodles on Instagram)
ALT A diagram illustrates choices when working with AI. At the top, a computer screen displays light bulbs. Below, two paths are shown: "Cognitive Surrender" on the left, with a brain and bulbs indicating accepting AI's answers and mistakes; "Cognitive Strength" on the right, with a brain and magnifying glass, suggesting using AI's insights and catching its mistakes.
Steven Shaw retweeted
Cognitive surrender is the risk of outsourcing hiking decisions to AI. Why AI trip plans need checking against official sources and conditions on the ground.
trailhiking.com.au/human-fac…
#hiking #bushwalking #trailhikingaustralia
trailhiking.com.au/human-fac…
Steven Shaw retweeted
Cognitive surrender: AI’s threat to democracy tinyurl.com/ykurzmdm
Steven Shaw retweeted
🚨 MIT just published the most comprehensive report, proving universities have no remaining reason to exist.
A committee of professors and students spent five months studying what AI is doing to learning on campus. The findings are a warning, not a footnote.
Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce a credible answer to almost any undergraduate assignment.
The report has a name for what's happening to students: "cognitive surrender." Reaching for AI the instant something gets hard, before even trying to think it through.
The numbers back it up:
46% of MIT undergrads use LLMs daily
90% say they're worried about their own overreliance
More students now believe AI makes them replaceable than believe it makes them capable
MIT's answer wasn't more surveillance. No AI detectors, no lockdown browsers. The committee called that path unreliable and said it just breeds distrust.
Instead: oral exams, semester-long portfolios, in-person project work, a required social component in every subject. They're even floating rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to game, most of the incentive to cheat disappears.
The most famous tech school on the planet just admitted the machines broke its teaching model.
Its answer was more humans, not more software.
(Paper link in comments)
Steven Shaw retweeted
If you use AI at work, you should read this. It is based on an experiment which studies three sets of people in a project solving task; some allowed to us AI, some not.
I think it’s fascinating (and scary) that such a thing as cognitive surrender even exists to begin with. Give this a read.
executiveeducation.wharton.u…
Steven Shaw retweeted
What is “cognitive surrender”, and how can you combat it? @addyosmani, author & director of engineering:
“Cognitive surrender is where you blindly give in to whatever the AI says as your answer. Its answer becomes your answer. You start to really let go of critical thinking and your ability to solve problems just goes to the wayside.”
How do you combat cognitive surrender when Claude Code or Codex has fired more sub-agents than you can read through?
#1. Read the decision summary: if there isn’t one, “prompt for that decision process. You have to be careful because you don't want a model to kind of BS you about the decisions that were made because it can just make things up.”
#2. Enter into a “mutual amplification” cycle with the agent: “make sure that the agent is getting better every day and you as an engineer are getting better every day.
Within the session or within this project, can you log your learnings from the session? Can you log any decisions that were made? Any friction that you ran into? Anything that you think is unique about how you've approached this problem that I should just keep in mind?”
Steven Shaw retweeted
Why Cognitive Surrender is a problem with us, not AI. From @samnewman, author of Building Microservices & Building Resilient Distributed Systems:
"Cognitive Surrender: that's not really a problem with LLMs, that's a problem with us.
If you are, say, an oncologist, a cancer specialist, there's a big difference between:
#1: an LLM doing detection of the scans you're looking at going, "Oh, you should look over there. By the way, you might have missed that", versus
#2: the LLM-powered AI going, "Here's all the scans I've looked through. Here's the ones I need you to sign off."
The last one, the second one, takes the expert out of the loop and makes them an approver. Often, in that context, they've got rid of a bunch of other oncologists. You've got one person at the end of the funnel, but that's a cost saving that's going to lead into issues.
So much of our current use of AI is not freeing us up from critical thinking. It's causing more context switching. It's causing less time for thinking. People are working longer hours. We've got studies that show this now.
And it's like, come on, that's not necessarily AI's fault. It's just how we're using it.”
Steven Shaw retweeted
It's a disaster in the making. trib.al/q2Qj3qT
Steven Shaw retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: AI actress Tilly Norwood glitches and starts speaking CHINESE during her interview with Piers Morgan and real-life actor Tom Conti...
Watch the full interview at 7pm (BST)👇
📺 youtube.com/piersmorganuncen…
@piersmorgan | @TillyNorwoodX
Steven Shaw retweeted
A new MIT report finds AI is causing mass 'cognitive surrender’:
A landmark study from an MIT committee reveals that pervasive artificial intelligence usage is fundamentally eroding active learning. The report warns that students are falling into 'cognitive surrender,' reaching for chatbots at the first sign of difficulty and bypassing the 'productive struggle' crucial for developing critical thinking.
This over reliance has led to an 'illusion of learning' where homework scores rise but actual memory retention and test performances plummet.
Furthermore, the report details an isolating shift in campus culture: traditional study groups are vanishing and office hours sit empty as students choose automated chatbot replies over human collaboration.
Despite these alarming findings, a deep divide has emerged between cautious faculty and optimistic university leaders who continue to aggressively champion AI integration. While some administrators argue that embracing the technology is necessary to keep institutions relevant, others are recognizing that current evaluation methods are broken.
To combat this, schools like MIT are avoiding unreliable AI detectors and instead rebuilding curricula around human-centric assessments — such as oral exams, semester portfolios, and mandatory group work — designed to rescue education by reclaiming the struggle of thinking.
source: Blinder, A. (2026). Universities Sound Warnings About A.I. Even as They Embrace It. The New York Times.
ALT A new MIT report finds AI is causing mass 'cognitive surrender’: A landmark study from an MIT committee reveals that pervasive artificial intelligence usage is fundamentally eroding active learning. The report warns that students are falling into 'cognitive surrender,' reaching for chatbots at the first sign of difficulty and bypassing the 'productive struggle' crucial for developing critical thinking. This over reliance has led to an 'illusion of learning' where homework scores rise but actual memory retention and test performances plummet. Furthermore, the report details an isolating shift in campus culture: traditional study groups are vanishing and office hours sit empty as students choose automated chatbot replies over human collaboration. Despite these alarming findings, a deep divide has emerged between cautious faculty and optimistic university leaders who continue to aggressively champion AI integration.
Steven Shaw retweeted
Tech insiders and senior executives have spent recent weeks issuing loud warnings about the risks posed by artificial intelligence software. Some are even causing concerns that AI models could lead to eventual human extinction.
But what if the real existential risk is more subtle — albeit powerful — than we imagine? @vauhinivara joins @chafkin and @svaneksmith on the Everybody's Business podcast to unpack warnings for "cognitive surrender” and how a startup called Pangram is promising to help identify AI generated slop. Listen and watch at bit.ly/4diMcN4.
Steven Shaw retweeted
Handing specific tasks to AI models increasingly makes sense. But the technology’s range of capabilities raises the worrying prospect of wholesale “cognitive surrender” economist.com/business/2026/…
Steven Shaw retweeted
On Everybody’s Business, we drill into the week’s apocalyptic warnings and a way to protect student brains from chatbot-induced atrophy bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Steven Shaw retweeted
An MIT report warns AI is causing ‘cognitive surrender’ and universities are in a bind bit.ly/4cLowjH
Steven Shaw retweeted
Widespread adoption of AI has fuelled concerns about the impact the technology might be having on learning. Our charts help explain its educational effects economist.com/graphic-detail…
