Artificial intelligence (AI) as a mental prosthesis for neurodivergent people: a theoretical proposal for inclusive education
Keywords:
Artificial intelligence (AI), Neurodivergence, Educational inclusion, Mental prosthesis, Inclusive educationAbstract
This paper understands artificial intelligence as a possible mental prosthesis supporting neurodivergent people in educational contexts. Drawing on the right to inclusive education, Universal Design for Learning, and UNESCO's human-centred frameworks on AI, it argues that many barriers do not stem from individual incapacity but from environments designed around majoritarian cognitive assumptions. The notion of a mental prosthesis does not attribute consciousness or authorship to AI; rather, it frames AI as a situated, supervised, and critical mediation for organizing ideas, explicating intuitions, sequencing reasoning, translating complex structures, and reducing extraneous cognitive load. The paper argues that inclusive education requires revising the institutional conditions of intelligibility of learning in order to recognize diverse ways of thinking, expressing, and producing knowledge.
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