No child is born able to read. The brain ships with no reading region at all. It builds one, and the construction runs on the exact effort AI removes.
Learning to read physically repurposes a patch of visual cortex. A spot in the left fusiform gyrus starts out tuned to objects and faces. Through months of effortful decoding, a 6-year-old converts it into the visual word form area, the region every literate adult uses to recognize words on sight. Stanislas Dehaene mapped it and called it neuronal recycling. Pre-literate kids show no special response to letters there. It shows up only as they struggle to read.
The struggle is the build signal. When a child strains to sound out a word or hold a sum in working memory, focus chemicals like acetylcholine and norepinephrine flag that circuit as worth keeping. Effort is how the nervous system marks which synapses to strengthen. Low effort, no marker.
Errors carry the same signal. The brain learns from the gap between what it predicted and what turned out true. Each wrong guess followed by a correction releases the dopamine that drives the rewire. Fluent, instant output produces almost none of it.
The wiring locks in later, during deep sleep, when the circuits tagged that day get consolidated. Only the ones that fired hard enough to get tagged. A child who never strained tagged nothing to keep.
Hand that child a model that returns the sentence or the answer on demand, and the strain, the errors, and the prediction gap vanish at once. The worksheet looks finished. The cortex that should have rewired underneath it never fired.
The window is the urgent part. The tissue reading recycles is where childhood plasticity peaks, and ages 6 to 13 are when that repurposing is cheapest. Miss the reps then and the same wiring costs far more to build later, if it builds at all.
Norway is the country that already ran the opposite experiment. In 2016 they gave a tablet to every 5-year-old, went all in on screens in class, and watched the results for a decade. Now they're pulling AI out for ages 6 to 13 and funding paper books again. A government reading its own data ahead of the curve.
The biology is identical in every country. Norway just moved on it first. Watch how fast others follow.
Interesting AF (@interesting_aIl)
Norway bans AI access in schools for kids ages 6-13, while also restricting AI for kids 14-16 to prevent academic decline
— https://nitter.net/interesting_aIl/status/2068495889648271513#m