Abstract

AI systems are becoming our daily companions, answering questions, shaping choices, and in subtle ways taking over our thinking. Left unchecked, they risk making us passive, dependent, and less able to reason for ourselves. But what if these same technologies could do the opposite - help us become sharper thinkers, more curious learners, and wiser decision-makers? In this talk, Valdemar Danry (PhD researcher at the MIT Media Lab) presents large-scale studies revealing where today’s AI can undermine us as well as new types of chat interfaces, wearables, and real-time signals that help people reason more clearly, question more deeply, and learn faster.

Speaker Bio

Valdemar Danry is an award-winning PhD researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he explores how AI can amplify rather than erode human reasoning. By combining insights from AI, cognitive science, and philosophy, he designs Socratic AI companions and wearable cognitive tools that help people think more critically, reason more clearly, and maintain intellectual independence in an age of automation. Through large-scale behavioral studies, his research investigates how current AI systems can inadvertently weaken human judgment and decision-making, while creating new systems that strengthen independent thought. 

Danry's work has been published in premier academic venues including Nature: Machine Intelligence, Frontiers in Computer Science, and the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. He has collaborated with researchers from UC Berkeley, Harvard, Georgia Tech, and ETH Zürich, as well as with organizations such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta Reality Labs, and Microsoft Research. 

His work has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, Forbes, Scientific American, Time Magazine, The Guardian, and TEDx.