When AI Does the Work, What Is Learning For? Post-Instrumental Learning and the Risk of Capacity Dissolution
arXiv:2607.28041
The paper argues that as AI can produce the outputs traditionally used to judge competence, learning should focus on preserving human capacities—like setting goals, giving reasons, contesting decisions, refusing or revising outcomes, and participating—rather than just improving AI performance.
Abstract
As AI systems become capable of producing the essays, code, reports, summaries, plans, and decisions through which institutions usually recognize competence, a familiar question becomes harder to answer: what is learning for? Existing AI ethics rightly emphasizes present failures--bias, opacity, hallucination, labor extraction, privacy risk, and weak accountability. But if the case for learning rests only on those failures, then each technical improvement appears to weaken it. This article develops a different answer. Using the idealization of AI that executes specified tasks flawlessly while lacking authority over purposes, legitimacy, and responsibility, we argue for post-instrumental learning: learning that preserves the capacities people and institutions need when many useful outputs can be delegated. We analyze five such capacities--end-setting, reason-giving, contestability, refusal/revision, and participation--and name their erosion capacity dissolution. The central case is assessment under generative AI. When a polished artifact no longer reliably evidences understanding, institutions must assess the learner's accountable relation to AI-mediated work rather than the artifact alone. The takeaway is practical: AI governance should evaluate not only whether systems perform well, but also whether their deployment leaves people able to understand, challenge, revise, and share responsibility for the practices those systems mediate.
Accepted at the Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2026), Malmö, Sweden, October 12--14, 2026. 19 pages, 1 table