‘Never-skilling’: High school rush to AI threatens to create a generation of dunces

July 30, 2026 — 5:00am

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In the 1932 classic Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined a future in which social class was determined not by education, inheritance or access to opportunity, but by cognitive capacity. Alphas and Betas occupied the jobs that required logic and critical thinking, while menial roles were assigned to lower strata with cruder cognitive abilities enforced by genetic and social conditioning. At the bottom were the Epsilons: “semi-morons” whose cognition was so diminished they were incapable of learning to read or write.

As AI continues its relentless colonisation of everything from the labour and stock markets to the arts, media, warfare and the internet itself, it’s never been more critical to safeguard the capacity of our own brains.

Those of us who came of age in an era of books, paper and dial-up modems have had our intellectual scaffolding shaped by now seemingly quaint notions like truth, facts, nuance and common sense. To us, it might seem obvious that mental labour and application is required to master one subject or another. That the learning is in the effort itself, and that this is a good thing.

When Gen X and Millennials offload some of our mental effort to AI we can mostly still draw on the foundational skills learnt during those intensive years of childhood education. This knowledge base theoretically equips us to critically evaluate whatever the bot serves up, sorting fact from hallucination and knowing how to refine any follow-up prompts.

Worryingly, research is beginning to indicate that shifting too much “cognitive load” onto AI can lead to the atrophy of core intellectual........

© The Sydney Morning Herald