The term ‘digital native’ was invented in 2001 by Marc Prensky, in a paper which argued that teaching methods should be adapted to suit students who had grown up exposed to digital technology, particularly ubiquitous devices such as smart phones. Since then, like many such terms, the concept of ‘digital natives’ has been used, misused and contested. Perhaps its most simplistic characterisation is that in which young people are simultaneously capable of holding multiple conversations with their friends, streaming a film, making a video (and, these days, consulting with their favourite chatbot), while their parents or older colleagues are struggling to set the timer on the microwave.

I’m not qualified to judge whether the original use of the term ‘digital native’ was valid, or what the implications are for education (although I will observe that every generation seems to commission research which proposes that there is something weird and different about this set of young people, while describing differences that may be attributable to older people forgetting what it means to be young, and younger people lacking the experience of being older). However, I do think that there is a dangerous assumption in the term, that people who are highly familiar with a set of consumer technologies are somehow more ‘tech savvy’, and have a deeper understanding of the digital world.

The term ‘cognitive offloading’ precedes the current generation of AI products. It was coined in a paper written in 2016 by Evan Risko and Sam Gilbert. In that paper, the term referred to the externalisation of reasoning and memory, including practices as advanced as using Internet search engines to find answers to questions, or as basic as tying knots in handkerchiefs to remind yourself that you have something to remember. It suggested that, although the practice has been around as long as humans have been able to manipulate their environment, offloading cognition could impair the ability to reason and remember, or be responsible for more subtle effects, such as undermining people’s confidence in their own thought and memory. The paper concluded that more research was required, particularly into metacognition: the practice of thinking about thinking.

Ten years later, the need for that research seems even more pressing. We have more tools on which to offload our cognition, and more people who are using them to do just that. Sometimes this offloading is explicit and deliberate, such as when somebody asks an LLM-based product to produce a business strategy or write an essay. But sometimes it is implicit and incidental, such as when somebody asks such a product to draft an email or summarise a document for them. They might think that they are merely offloading the work of typing or scanning mundane verbiage, but their choice means that there are thoughts that they will not think.