SBS Chinese explores if AI use is hurting Gen Z cognitive skills

This segment captures a growing undercurrent in the AI debate that is easy to dismiss but hard to ignore. The worry is not that chatbots will suddenly turn evil, but that a generation raised on auto‑summaries, autocomplete essays and endless short‑form feeds will lose some of the cognitive habits needed to supervise powerful systems. The neuroscientist quoted by SBS points to declines in attention, working memory and reading comprehension relative to older cohorts, and explicitly links them to heavy reliance on AI for search, drafting and even basic thinking. ([sbs.com.au](https://www.sbs.com.au/language/chinese/zh-hant/podcast-episode/tech-world-zenz-dumber/2tt91s5qp))

For the AGI race, this is a sobering counterpoint to narratives about AI as a universal productivity enhancer. If our human operators become less capable of sustained reasoning and deep reading, the window in which we can safely keep humans in the loop on increasingly agentic systems narrows. That is not destiny; it is a design problem. But it suggests that education ministries and platform designers should treat cognitive resilience as a first‑class objective alongside test scores and engagement metrics if they want a citizenry that can meaningfully govern and collaborate with advanced AI.