AI as the Next Literacy

"Every time a new technology arrives, we're told it will replace what we already know. With artificial intelligence (AI), the anxiety is even sharper: Will it make our skills obsolete? Will it change how humans learn at the deepest level? It will change us-but not by erasing what came before. AI is better understood as a new literacy: another layer of skill that builds on, rather than replaces, the foundations of human development."

"Tom Byer, one of the world's best-known youth soccer coaches, famously gave his 16-month-old son a ball to walk with. For Byer, the essence of soccer is not tactics or competition but ball manipulation: the small, sensorimotor connections between body and object that begin in early childhood. Soccer, in this view, starts as soon as a toddler takes those first clumsy steps with a ball. Only later do strategy, passing, and team play emerge."

"You still need to run, track the ball, and position your body-the same foundation soccer demands. But add a racket, and the game transforms. The tool extends your reach, creates new possibilities, and changes your strategies. Yet none of this happens without the fundamentals. Reading offers another example. Humans didn't evolve eyes for reading; we evolved them to track motion, recognize faces, and navigate the environment. Millennia later, those visual systems were repurposed for literacy. Reading was revolutionary, but it never eliminated talking and listening."

Early motor interactions with objects form the basis of complex skills. Ball manipulation in childhood creates sensorimotor links that precede tactics, strategy, and teamwork in soccer. Tool use extends bodily capabilities without replacing foundational perception and movement; a racket adds reach and strategy but still relies on running, tracking, and positioning. Literacy repurposed evolved visual systems for symbol decoding while leaving spoken language intact. New technologies, including AI, act as additional literacies that layer on preexisting developmental foundations rather than erase them. Human learning grows by building higher-order skills from embodied perceptual and motor competencies.

Read at Psychology Today