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Gideon Nave
We're outsourcing more and more of our thinking to AI. What is that doing to our minds? And how can we preserve our human judgment, creativity, and agency?
Professor, Wharton School | Poets & Quants Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors
Lavin Exclusive Speaker
The rise of AI tools has come with a rise in “cognitive surrender”: the tendency for people to increasingly defer their thinking and decision-making to AI. “For the first time in history, we have tools that can perform not only physical labor but also cognitive labor,” says Wharton professor Gideon Nave. “As these systems become more capable, the greatest impact of AI may not lie in what it can accomplish, but in how it transforms the way we think.” Widely recognized for his work on the psychological impact of AI, Gideon is the co-author of the research that introduced the concept of cognitive surrender. He is also an engineering-trained cognitive neuroscientist whose research combines his technical, scientific, and business expertise to help audiences understand how AI is changing the way we think, and how to use it to enhance rather than replace our human judgment and creativity. “The decisions we make today about how we use AI will shape not only productivity, but also the future of human expertise, creativity, and independent thinking,” he says.
Gideon Nave is a chaired Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies how people think, decide, create, and interact with emerging technologies. Trained as an electrical engineer and neuroscientist, he earned his PhD from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and has built a research career at the intersection of human behavior, technology, and decision-making. Gideon is widely recognized for his work on the psychological impact of artificial intelligence. He is the co-author of the research that introduced the concept of cognitive surrender—the tendency for people to increasingly defer their thinking, judgment, and decision-making to AI systems. His work explores one of the defining questions of the AI era: as intelligent systems become more capable, what happens to human autonomy, creativity, expertise, and critical thinking?
Through engaging talks grounded in cutting-edge research, Gideon examines how AI is reshaping the way people generate ideas, solve problems, and make decisions. He addresses both the opportunities and risks of AI adoption, helping audiences navigate a future in which machines may know us, predict us, and influence us in unprecedented ways.
Beyond AI, his research uses neuroscience, genetics, and large-scale behavioral data to uncover the biological and psychological foundations of human behavior. He is also an advocate for improving scientific rigor and reproducibility, with work focused on making research more transparent, trustworthy, and impactful.
Gideon’s research has been published in leading scientific journals, including Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, Management Science, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Research. He has received the Association for Psychological Science’s Rising Star Award and the Association for Consumer Research’s Early Career Award, and was named one of Poets & Quants’ Best 40 Under 40 Business School Professors.
A sought-after speaker for corporate, academic, and public audiences, Gideon helps organizations understand how AI is changing human cognition, and what it will take to preserve human judgment, creativity, and agency in an age of increasingly intelligent machines.
Speech Topics
Artificial IntelligenceRead more
Cognitive SurrenderThinking Fast, Slow, and Artificial
Human cognition evolved to balance effortless intuition with deliberate reasoning. Yet as AI systems become increasingly capable, they are changing not only what we think, but how we think.
In this keynote, Gideon Nave explores the concept of cognitive surrender—the growing tendency to outsource judgment, analysis, and decision-making to artificial intelligence. Drawing on insights from psychology, neuroscience, and real-world evidence from domains such as education and medicine, this Wharton professor examines the benefits and hidden costs of delegating thought to machines. He asks a provocative question: could the greatest AI risk be not a sudden technological singularity, but a gradual “slow singularity” in which humans increasingly relinquish the practice of thinking itself? And he shows us how we can leverage instead of outsourcing the very cognitive processes that develop expertise, creativity, and judgment.
CreativityRead more
Creativity in the Age of AIWhy More Ideas May Mean Less Innovation
Generative AI can help people produce ideas faster, more easily, and often with higher average quality. But there is a hidden tradeoff: as more people rely on the same models, their ideas may become increasingly similar.
Drawing on research in creativity, innovation, and human-AI collaboration, Wharton professor Gideon Nave examines how AI is reshaping the creative process. He shows why diversity—not just quality—is the fuel of breakthrough innovation, how AI can unintentionally narrow the space of possibilities, and what individuals and organizations can do to preserve originality. The future of creativity, he says, may depend not on generating more ideas, but on generating different ones.
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