Teachers fear AI could weaken critical thinking — Mark Cuban says it can do the opposite and build better leaders (www.businessinsider.com)

Billionaire Mark Cuban argued that students who learn to collaborate with AI—by crafting strong prompts, interrogating outputs and applying human judgment—will be “best equipped to lead” in the future workplace, and he’s backing that view via a partnership with entrepreneur Emma Grede and Samsung’s Solve for Tomorrow education program. His stance clashes with widespread educator alarm: a HarrisX October survey of 620 U.S. middle and high school teachers found 88% see AI as important for students’ futures but 81% worry overreliance will weaken critical thinking. Research from Oxford University Press surveying 2,000 UK teens similarly warned AI is producing faster but shallower thinking, while academics describe students “outsourcing” thought and risking an “atrophy of epistemic vigilance” — the ability to question, verify and reason independently. For the AI/ML community this debate matters for product design, classroom deployment and policy: tools that encourage transparent reasoning, explainability, and interactive prompting (rather than one-shot answers) could bolster critical thinking, while opaque, turnkey outputs risk hollowing it out. The split underscores a practical need for curricula teaching prompt engineering, source verification, model limitations and human-in-the-loop workflows so AI becomes a cognitive amplifier, not a substitute. How educators, vendors and researchers translate those practices into assessment, guardrails and pedagogy will shape whether AI strengthens or erodes core reasoning skills.