CONCEPT
Iatrogenic Learning
The Bruner volume's diagnostic category — borrowed from medicine, where iatrogenic harm is caused by the treatment itself — for educational interventions that produce the appearance of development while undermining the development they were designed to produce.
The term is borrowed from medicine, where iatrogenic describes harm caused by the treatment itself — the hospital-acquired infection, the side effect of the drug. Applied to education and cognitive development, it names a specific failure mode: a learning intervention that produces the appearance of development while undermining the development it was designed to produce. The scaffold that never withdraws is iatrogenic in precisely this sense. It produces impressive performance while potentially preventing the independent development that performance should reflect. The Bruner volume proposes the concept as the sharpest available diagnostic for AI partnership's most distinctive risk — not failure of tools, but harm produced by their success.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The possibility of iatrogenic harm does not imply AI scaffolding should be abandoned. The Bruner volume is explicit about this. The productivity gains are real. The democratization of capability is genuine. The expansion of who gets to build matters morally and practically. But