Designing the Future of Learning — Aditya Johri, George Mason University

"Designing the Future of Learning: Cognition as Responsible HCI in the AI Era and Beyond" Human beings are unique among species in having developed formal systems for educating one another. Schooling is the primary mechanism through which societies cultivate cognition, preserve culture, and accumulate collective intelligence. At its core, learning has long depended on a stable triad consisting of a learner, a more knowledgeable other (teacher or mentor), and a source of knowledge. Viewed through this lens, the history of educational technology is the history of redistributing cognitive work and performance across these three vertices. Writing, print, libraries, computers, and the Internet each transformed learning by shifting cognitive work while leaving the overall architecture of the triad intact. Generative AI represents a fundamental departure. For the first time, a single computational artifact simultaneously reshapes all three vertices by serving as a source of knowledge, assuming instructional roles, and actively participating in learners' reasoning, writing, creativity, and decision making. This raises a fundamental question: if intelligent artifacts increasingly perform human cognitive work, what cognitive work must remain with people, and why should they continue to learn? I argue that this question places cognition at the center of responsible HCI for the future, especially within academia. While responsible computing has emphasized fairness, privacy, transparency, accountability, and safety, these concerns remain incomplete without understanding how AI redistributes cognitive work and reshapes human cognition and the meaning humans must make within the human-artifact ecosystem that inhabit. The central challenge for HCI is therefore not simply designing interactions with intelligent systems but designing cognitive ecosystems that preserve the human capacities essential for learning, agency, innovation, and democratic society.