AI Fifty years after South Africa's youth fought for educational rights, a new battle looms: the silent surrender of critical thinking to artificial intelligence. Are we sacrificing our youth's cognitive agency?
In 1976, South Africa’s youth took to the streets to claim educational agency and the hard-won right to self-determination.
Fifty years later, our young digital natives face a quieter, subtler crisis: the gradual surrender of that very critical reasoning and agency to artificial intelligence.
The youth’s growing digital comfort is in many ways a shield against persistent unemployment, but we must not over-generalise and mistake screen-deep fluency for actual digital resilience – it blinds us to the profound cognitive, societal, and commercial risks of AI-dependence and growing cognitive outsourcing.
According to a Pew Research Centre survey of 1 458 teenagers aged 13–17, 64% have used AI chatbots, and nearly 30% use them daily.
