AI & The Future of Critical Thinking
Session description
AI systems are rapidly becoming our daily companions—answering questions, shaping choices, and, in subtle ways, taking over our thinking. Left unchecked, they risk making us more passive and less able to reason for ourselves. In this session, Valdemar Danry, a PhD researcher at the MIT Media Lab, explores how AI can instead be designed to strengthen human reasoning. Drawing on large-scale behavioral studies, he will show where today’s AI systems can undermine judgment and critical thinking, and present new chat interfaces, wearables, and real-time cognitive tools that help people reason more clearly, question more deeply, and learn faster.
This event is part of the Nordic Responsible AI Summit virtual series, bringing together researchers, policymakers, and leaders to explore how responsible AI moves from principles to practice.
Format
Virtual talk + Q&A (30+15 minutes)
Target audience
Public-sector and corporate leaders working with AI
Education, learning, and L&D leaders
Product, UX, and AI teams designing human–AI interaction
Researchers and practitioners in human–AI interaction and AI ethics
Speaker bio
Valdemar Danry is an award-winning PhD researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he explores how AI can amplify rather than erode human reasoning. By combining insights from AI, cognitive science, and philosophy, he designs Socratic AI companions and wearable cognitive tools that help people think more critically, reason more clearly, and maintain intellectual independence in an age of automation. Through large-scale behavioral studies, his research investigates how current AI systems can inadvertently weaken human judgment and decision-making, while creating new systems that strengthen independent thought.
Danry’s work has been published in leading academic venues, including Nature Machine Intelligence, Frontiers in Computer Science, and the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. He has collaborated with researchers from UC Berkeley, Harvard, Georgia Tech, and ETH Zürich, as well as with organizations such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta Reality Labs, and Microsoft Research. His work has been exhibited at BOZAR Brussels Centre for Fine Arts, Ars Electronica, Electrical Artifacts, and the MIT Museum, and featured in The New York Times, Wired, Forbes, Scientific American, Time Magazine, The Guardian, and TEDx.