AI’s quietest risk may not be a science-fiction robot uprising, but the habit of reaching for a chatbot before thinking a problem through. In a Dawn essay published on 17 October, Hiba Khan argues for balancing AI use with people’s own critical judgement, rather than treating the tools as either miracle workers or something to ban.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Khan points to AI’s growing use in classrooms and workplaces, from generating assignments to automating routine tasks. Her concern is that convenience can become dependence: when a model produces a confident answer, people may skip the work of forming and testing their own view. She also notes that AI systems make mistakes, and that detection tools can flag ordinary writing features as signs of AI use.
The essay raises another cost often left out of the chat window: water used by data centres. Citing the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, Khan says large data centres can consume up to five million gallons a day. That figure is reported in the essay, not a measurement of every data centre or AI service.
Read Hiba Khan’s essay in Dawn.
Why it matters
This is less a case against using AI than a question about what we hand over to it. If students and workers routinely outsource the first draft of their thinking, the convenience may come with a cost that is harder to spot than a wrong answer: fewer chances to practise making an argument, checking a claim or solving a problem unaided.
Khan’s essay is commentary, not evidence that AI use is causing a measurable decline in critical thinking. But it gives the debate a useful shape: consider not just what a tool can do, but which skills people still need to exercise themselves.
Our read
“Use AI, but keep your brain in the loop” is not exactly a revolutionary slogan. It is, however, a sensible test for classrooms and workplaces. A tool that saves time is only a bargain if people still know how to judge what it gives them. And a detector that treats good grammar as suspicious is not much of a referee.
What to watch
- Whether schools teach when to use AI as well as when to work without it.
- How workplaces check AI-generated material and make responsibility clear.
- Whether reliable evidence emerges on AI’s effects on learning and critical thinking.
Discussion spark: Should schools and workplaces set rules for when people must do the thinking without AI, or should users decide for themselves when the tool has taken over too much?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (16 October 2026, 23:58 UTC)
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