Shiftheads - Kids and AI Are Not the Crisis You Think

Kids and AI use get blamed for a lot these days, but Dr. Michelle Sengara says the panic sounds a lot like every panic before it, from video games to the calculator to electricity itself. She questions whether what looks like a loss of critical thinking right now might actually be a skill nobody has learned to measure yet. Screen time numbers get treated as solid proof something is wrong, and Michelle argues the metric barely holds up under its own assumptions. A student can sit through an entire video without absorbing a single idea, and the dashboard would never know the difference. She lays out what she thinks should replace the number entirely. A group of students found a workaround hidden inside a Google Doc test during remote learning, reading the source code to see answers meant to stay buried. Michelle says what happened next says less about kids cheating and more about a system that was never built to survive being looked at closely. Topics: kids and AI learning, screen time myths, cognitive development, education systems, habit formation GUEST: Dr. Michelle Sengara | @‌michellesengara Originally aired on 2026-08-25