The illusion of agency: deconstructing AI’s influence on the generation of authentic agency in early childhood

Abstract

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into early childhood environments is most often judged through a binary lens of educational benefit versus technological harm. This framing overlooks a deeper question: how these systems reshape the ecological conditions on which child development depends. This exploratory, theory-generating conceptual inquiry examines how experts conceptualize the tension between the highly efficient illusion of agency presented by AI systems and the ecological conditions that support the development of authentic agency in young children. Using a qualitative expert-interview approach, we gathered the perspectives of six interdisciplinary scholars and analyzed them through a primarily deductive and partly inductive content analysis. Anchored in the multiple-realizability-of-agency thesis, actor-network theory, and complexity systems thinking, the analysis suggests that experts perceive AI’s simulation of interactivity, autonomy, and adaptability as potentially reducing the physical and social frictions that support developmental processes, redistributing decision-making within child–adult–AI networks, and limiting opportunities for the development of resilience. Drawing on these expert perspectives and the study’s theoretical framework, we argue for a conceptual reorientation from pedagogical scaffolding toward learning-ecosystem architecture and propose a pedagogy of friction that preserves the desirable difficulties through which authentic agency is nurtured.