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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.
It shouldn't have been this easy. The ease with which AI has overturned practices, policies, and pedagogies has been seen as a natural, if stunning, evolution in our mode of analysis and thinking. The authors make the case that this apparent ease has a reason: we have gradually changed the way we think to become near models of algorithms and mechanical systems. What Is AI Doing to Us? is a deeply sobering and fantastically creative journey into the foundations of what it means to learn and think in the current moment.
— Ted Mitchell, President, American Council on Education
Muhammed Şahin is Rector of MEF University in Istanbul, Türkiye.
Caroline Fell Kurban is Advisor to the Rector at MEF University in Istanbul, Türkiye.
Foreword; Eric Mazur
Part I. The Arrival
Chapter 1. When Everything Changed
Chapter 2. Our Initial Response
Chapter 3. Everything in Place, Something Still Missing
Part II. The Question
Chapter 4. Beyond Design Parameters
Chapter 5. The Question We Can’t Avoid
Part III. Learning to See
Chapter 6. The Structures of Human Existence
Chapter 7. When Authentic Learning Becomes the Path of Greatest Resistance
Chapter 8. When Authentic Educational Practice Becomes the Path of Greatest Resistance
Part IV. The Convergence
Chapter 9. The Systematic Preparation
Chapter 10. When Human and Machine Converge
Chapter 11. What AI Really Is
Chapter 12. What AI Is Doing to Us
Part V. Learning to Choose
Chapter 13. What Authentic Choosing Requires
Chapter 14. How Authentic Learning Unfolds
Chapter 15. How Authentic Learning Endures
Chapter 16. How Shared Authenticity Reveals Itself
Part VI. The Turn
Chapter 17. We Are the Phenomenon
Part VII. The Paradox
Chapter 18. The Inescapable Paradox
Chapter 19. Living Within the Paradox
Part VIII. The Turn Lived
Chapter 20. The Impossibility of Disclosure
Chapter 21. How Far This Goes
Part IX. The Clearing
Chapter 22. What Is AI Doing to Us?