PERSON
Jerome Bruner
American cognitive psychologist and educational theorist (1915–2016) whose six decades of research established constructivism, scaffolding, the spiral curriculum, and the distinction between narrative and paradigmatic modes of thought — the vocabulary through which the developmental stakes of AI become precisely visible.
Born blind and not seeing until surgery at age two, Jerome Seymour Bruner spent the following ninety-eight years studying how human beings construct the experience of the world. He co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with George Miller in 1960 — the first institutional home for what became the cognitive revolution — and spent the subsequent decades building a framework of unusual breadth: perception research in the 1940s, concept formation in the 1950s, educational theory in the 1960s, cross-cultural cognition in the 1970s, narrative cognition in the 1980s, cultural psychology and legal thought in the 1990s and 2000s. His concepts — scaffolding, the spiral curriculum, acts of meaning — provide the most precise available vocabulary for asking whether AI partnership develops the human or replaces her.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Bruner's intellectual trajectory traced an arc from perception to education to culture to narrative. In the late