What Is AI Doing to Us?

Abstract

When ChatGPT arrived, the authors responded as educators do, establishing policies, frameworks, and workshops. Everything looked right. Nothing felt adequate. That persistent unease became the starting point for What Is AI Doing to Us?, a philosophical inquiry into what artificial intelligence reveals about learning, thinking, and being. What came to light was unsettling. AI wasn't disrupting education; it was revealing what education had already become. Decades of well-intentioned improvements had quietly converted the struggle that builds understanding into procedures that algorithms could execute. We had all been preparing the ground for our own replacement. The question could no longer be what we can do with AI. It had to become what AI is doing to us. Drawing on Heidegger's philosophy of technology, the authors trace how systematic thinking undermines the uncertainty and temporal complexity that make learning genuinely human. But this is no detached analysis. As the inquiry unfolds, they recognise themselves within the phenomenon they are examining—the boundary between their own thinking and algorithmic processing becoming increasingly difficult to locate. What begins as a study of AI in education becomes an encounter with the nature of technological thinking itself. Essential reading for higher education instructors, leaders, and anyone concerned with the future of learning, What Is AI Doing to Us? bridges practical institutional challenges with profound philosophical insight, revealing why systematic responses consistently miss what matters most—and opening the space where authentic engagement becomes possible.