THE GREAT CRITICAL THINKING CRISIS: How to survive and thrive in the age of AI

About this episode

Send us Fan Mail Even in the internet era we used to search, compare, and make up our own minds. Now we can ask an AI one question and get a confident answer that feels final, even when it is biased, incomplete, or simply made up.  Critical thinking is one of the crisis of our age (yet another one?!) and we need to take it seriously: not as contrarian scepticism, but as the disciplined habit of testing claims, noticing our own assumptions, and asking the uncomfortable question, “What would change my mind?” and "Who does it benefit for me to think that?" We talk about why critical thinking is not intuitive and often has to be taught, how philosophy built the toolkit long before modern science, and why so much of life sits outside clean measurement.  Then the messy present: generative AI, chatbots, prompt bias, sycophancy, and the anchoring effect that nudges your next thought after the very first output. We also get into education and what happens when the process of learning is bypassed, plus the darker trust problem: deepfakes, verification, and the liar’s dividend where anyone can deny anything by claiming “it’s just AI”. Social media algorithms, echo chambers, outrage rewar