CONCEPT
The Mentorship Crisis (Enactive Reading)
The AI-transition erosion of intersubjective transmission — Thompson's framework reveals mentorship as the passing of enacted cognition from one embodied mind to another, a transmission AI mediation systematically attenuates.
Mentorship, on the enactive account, is not the transfer of information from expert to novice. It is an intersubjective process through which the novice's cognitive and emotional capacities are shaped by direct engagement with the expert's enacted mind. The novice does not merely learn what the expert knows. She learns how the expert thinks — the felt priorities, the embodied habits of attention, the affective orientations that determine what the expert notices, what she investigates, what she cares about. This learning occurs not through instruction but through presence: through watching the expert work, through participating in problems alongside her, through the thousand micro-interactions that transmit not information but orientation. AI tools disrupt this process by reducing the novice's need for the expert's presence, and each avoided consultation is a micro-disruption of the intersubjective substrate through which embodied expertise is reproduced across generations.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The crisis is not visible in performance metrics. The junior