Never-Skilling

Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley!

Never-Skilling: Will Your Future Doctor Be Able to Think Without AI?

Imagine a young physician standing at your hospital bedside. The AI system is down—or worse, it’s confidently wrong. Can he reason his way to your diagnosis on his own? A new Perspective in Nature Medicine warns that if students rely on AI through medical school and residency, the answer may be “no.” Why? Not because doctors lost their clinical reasoning, but because they never built it in the first place. The authors call this never-skilling. It’s more insidious than ordinary deskilling, because AI-assisted trainees can always look competent. Until, oops, the AI isn’t there.

How could early AI reliance be so damaging? Because becoming an expert means building neural schemas—mental models the brain compresses out of many, many experiences. A schema is why you can walk into any restaurant on earth and know what generally happens—you get a menu, order, eat, and then pay. Experienced physicians gradually develop neural schemas for diagnosis, just as you did for restaurants—or for the standard operations of math. That’s how well-practiced doctors can size up a patient in moments. As neuroscientists Oded Bein and Yael Niv argue in an important review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, schemas are built through cycles of prediction and error—you make your own call (your prediction), reality pushes back, and your brain updates. This is often a somewhat difficult process—unless, of course, you’re using AI. Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut for novices, whether medical students or anyone else new to a field: the schemas you build yourself are what let you judge, later on, whether the AI is right.

The fix the Nature Medicine authors propose? Just as pilots must prove they can fly by hand before trusting the autopilot, medical students would earn their ability to use AI in stages: AI-free training first, then practice catching deliberately planted AI errors, and only then full human-AI collaboration. AI is often framed as a benevolent “copilot” — but a copilot is only useful if trainees first learn how to be pilots. 

And that’s doctors — adults with years of schooling behind them. Think how much higher the stakes are for young students building their first schemas. No schema, know nothing. 

Free Webinar: Becoming an Expert Teacher

My friend Nidhi Sachdeva — chair of researchED Canada, and co-author with Paul Kirschner of the forthcoming Becoming an Expert Teacher: Deliberate Practice for Effective Teaching — is giving a free CPD-certified webinar on Thursday, September 17: “Knowing What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: Becoming an Expert Teacher.” She’ll dig into what separates expert teachers from the rest of us, and why teaching is both a science and a craft. It runs at 4:00 p.m. London time (11:00 a.m. Eastern), and registrants get the recording afterward — so sign up even if you can’t make it live.
GOTO Copenhagen, September 29–30

I’ll be keynoting at GOTO Copenhagen on Wednesday, September 30, with “Grokking the Brain: What AI Reveals About How You Really Learn” — how AI’s strange habit of suddenly “grokking” a pattern after endless memorization gives us our clearest picture yet of how your own brain builds expertise. The day before, September 29, I’m teaching a full-day masterclass, “Learning How to Learn in an Age of AI,” for anyone who wants to learn better in a world of AI — teachers, parents, managers, and developers alike. We’ll dig into cutting-edge research on critical thinking and AI, with practical exercises and insights. Details and registration at https://gotocph.com/2026.

The Education Futures Fellowship

Svenia Busson spent years traveling the world to find out what really works in education — a journey that became her book Exploring the Future of Education — and went on to co-found the European Edtech Alliance. Her latest venture is the Education Futures Fellowship, a six-week online program for founders, product leads, and educators building AI products for children. What I like best is where it starts: not with the technology, but with how children’s brains develop. The faculty are experts in learning science, cognitive neuroscience, and child safety, and the curriculum tackles a topic near to my heart — the risks of cognitive offloading. The first cohort kicks off September 22, with applications due September 10, so if you’re building (or choosing) AI tools for young learners, check it out!

That’s all for now. Happy learning!

Barb Oakley

• Learning How to Learn—one of the world’s most popular MOOCs, with its recommended text, A Mind for Numbers 
• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn (for Youth)—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!