Our minds aren’t equipped to handle AI — SkimNews
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- Paul Cisek, a University of Montreal neuroscientist, argues brains evolved as feedback-control systems for environmental interaction rather than information processors — a model the essay says the AI industry has ignored in favor of the Turing-influenced computational view.
- Google's Demis Hassabis has called the brain 'a biological approximation to a Turing machine,' and Elon Musk has said 'people should just think of the brain as a biological computer' — quotes the author marshals to illustrate the field's load-bearing metaphor.
- John von Neumann himself doubted the computational model could capture the 'exceptional complexity of the human nervous system,' the essay notes, undermining the premise the AI industry was built on.
- The catching-a-fly-ball thought experiment shows the contrast: the computational model demands subconscious calculus on velocity and gravity, while the feedback-control approach uses a simple 'keep the ball in the same position within your visual field' heuristic.
- The essay traces human cultural evolution from imitation → oral language → writing → formal education → markets, law, and democracy, then accuses Big Tech of 'systematically working to dismantle' those knowledge-transmission norms.
- In a July 2025 podcast on AI in education, OpenAI VP of education Leah Belsky said 'learners' made up more than half of 900 million (figure cut off in source, likely weekly ChatGPT users) — a boast the author uses to show the junk-food product is being marketed directly into schools.
- The author likens AI to a 'cognitive hot dog': appealing in the moment but, like fatty foods for hunter-gatherer bodies, undermining cognitive systems built over millennia once it becomes a regular mental diet.
Why it matters: The essay's warning lands as AI companies push chatbots into classrooms: in a July 2025 podcast, OpenAI's education VP boasted that learners made up more than half of 900 million users (per the source), turning the 'cognitive junk food' critique from abstract neuroscience into a live question for every school weighing AI in curriculum.
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