AI isn't making us smarter — it's training us to think backward, an innovation theorist says

• John Nosta, founder of NostaLab, said AI isn't thinking — it favors fluency over understanding.
• He said AI flips human reasoning by giving polished answers before workers can think.
• He warned that smooth AI outputs can weaken judgment when speed replaces thinking at work.

AI is often described as a thinking machine — a digital mind edging closer to human intelligence.

However, John Nosta, an innovation theorist and founder of NostaLab, an innovation and tech think tank, said that large language models don't think like humans at all.

In fact, he calls AI "anti-intelligence" because it operates in a way that runs counter to how humans reason, learn, and build understanding.

"My conclusion is that artificial intelligence is antithetical to human cognition," Nosta told Business Insider. "I even call it anti-intelligence."

AI doesn't understand the way humans do

At the heart of Nosta's argument is a simple but unsettling claim: AI doesn't understand anything in the human sense.

When people think about an object — say, an apple — they place it in space, time, memory, culture, and lived experience, he said.

A large language model, Nosta said, does none of that. Instead, it represents the word as a mathematical object inside an enormous, hyperdimensional space and searches for patterns that statistically align, he said.

"An apple doesn't exist as an apple," he said. "It exists as a vector in a hyperdimensional space."

That distinction matters, he said, because it means AI outputs are optimized for coherence rather than comprehension.

The system isn't reasoning its way to an answer — it's producing the response that best fits a pattern of language, he said.

Why AI flips human thinking upside down

Nosta believes AI is quietly reshaping how people think, especially at work.

Human cognition, he said, usually follows a familiar path: confusion, exploration, tentative structure, and finally confidence. AI flips that sequence.

"With AI, we start with structure," he said. "We start with coherence, fluency, a sense of completeness, and afterwards we find confidence."

That inversion creates a powerful illusion. Because AI-generated answers sound polished and authoritative, people often accept them immediately — without doing the harder work of questioning, exploring, or fully understanding them, he said.

"Coming to the answer first is an inversion of human cognitive process," Nosta said. "That's antithetical to human thought."

The danger of smooth answers

The danger isn't that AI will outperform humans in raw computation. Nosta said that's inevitable. What worries him is how easily people can outsource the most valuable parts of thinking.

"It's the stumbles, it's the roughness, it's the friction that allows us to get to observations and hypotheses that really develop who we are," he said.

As some companies push employees to go "all in" on AI for writing, analysis, and decision-making, Nosta said that speed and fluency are being mistaken for understanding.

Used as a partner, AI can enhance human thinking. Used as a shortcut, it can quietly weaken it, he said.

"The magic isn't necessarily AI," he said. "It's the iterative dynamic between humans and machines."

In Nosta's view, the real risk of the AI era isn't smarter machines — it's humans learning to think backward.

A growing concern

Concerns about how AI may be reshaping human thinking are increasingly shared beyond theorists.

Researchers at Oxford University Press found in a recent report that AI is making students faster and more fluent while quietly stripping away the depth that comes from pausing, questioning, and thinking independently.

A report from the Work AI Institute, released last month, echoed the same pattern, saying that generative AI often creates an illusion of expertise — making users feel smarter and more productive, even as their underlying skills erode.

Mehdi Paryavi, CEO of the International Data Center Authority, which advises companies and governments on building the data centers that power AI, said that excessive and poorly designed AI use is driving a "quiet cognitive erosion."

"If you come to believe that AI writes better than you and thinks smarter than you, you will lose your own confidence in yourself," he told Business Insider.