What Is AI Doing to Us?: A Philosophical Inquiry into Learning, Thinking, and Being - Softcover

Şahin, Muhammed; Kurban, Caroline Fell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1837422796 ISBN 13: 9781837422791

Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2026

Synopsis

When ChatGPT arrived, the authors responded as educators do, establishing policies, frameworks, and workshops. Everything looked right. Nothing felt adequate. That persistent unease became the starting point for What Is AI Doing to Us?, a philosophical inquiry into what artificial intelligence reveals about learning, thinking, and being. What came to light was unsettling. AI wasn't disrupting education; it was revealing what education had already become. Decades of well-intentioned improvements had quietly converted the struggle that builds understanding into procedures that algorithms could execute. We had all been preparing the ground for our own replacement. The question could no longer be what we can do with AI. It had to become what AI is doing to us.

Drawing on Heidegger's philosophy of technology, the authors trace how systematic thinking undermines the uncertainty and temporal complexity that make learning genuinely human. But this is no detached analysis. As the inquiry unfolds, they recognise themselves within the phenomenon they are examining―the boundary between their own thinking and algorithmic processing becoming increasingly difficult to locate. What begins as a study of AI in education becomes an encounter with the nature of technological thinking itself.

Essential reading for higher education instructors, leaders, and anyone concerned with the future of learning, What Is AI Doing to Us? bridges practical institutional challenges with profound philosophical insight, revealing why systematic responses consistently miss what matters most―and opening the space where authentic engagement becomes possible.

About this title

About the Author

Muhammed Şahin is Rector of MEF University in Istanbul, Türkiye. 

Caroline Fell Kurban is Advisor to the Rector at MEF University in Istanbul, Türkiye.

Edition details

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1837422796
• ISBN 13: 9781837422791
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224