In a recent essay for The Verge, Benjamin Riley argues that the AI industry operates on a flawed metaphor: treating the brain as a computer. He contends that this model, which frames thought as input, computation, and output, ignores the evolutionary reality of how human cognition actually works. Drawing on neuroscientist Paul Cisek's work, Riley suggests the brain is better understood as a feedback-control system that acts on the world to shape what it perceives.
Riley calls AI "junk food for the mind"—easy, tempting, and ultimately bad for you. For businesses, this raises a warning: deploying AI tools that offload thinking may erode the cognitive capabilities that make workers valuable. The essay implies that companies rushing to integrate AI without understanding its cognitive effects could be undermining their own long-term productivity.
Rather than reverse-engineering the brain from the top down, Riley suggests building an understanding from the ground up, based on evolutionary history. For business leaders, the takeaway is to design AI that supports human judgment rather than replacing it, and to be skeptical of claims that AI can simply mimic human thought. The essay is an opinion piece, but it aligns with a growing body of research questioning the computational metaphor.