Critical Thinking in the age of AI - Bethan Winn
"AI is like the smartest grad who's never left the library. They've got no life experience... you need to check what they're doing, particularly if you're going to put your name to it." Bethan Winn
Bethan Winn is a critical thinking specialist, speaker and author of The Human Edge: Critical Thinking in the Age of AI, and through her business Human Skills Co she helps organisations figure out where the technology earns its keep and where it just gets in the way.
In this episode, Luella and Bethan talk through what happens when businesses let AI answer for them (and what it costs them when it gets it wrong), why offloading your "backstage" thinking work can quietly wear down your onstage skills, and a career that ran from Oxfam to a London classroom to building her own critical thinking practice from a Facebook post, prompted in part by a health scare that made the "someday" feel a lot more urgent.
Timestamps
00:05:33 - When AI answers for you: A quoted price, an "AI autobot," and why one bad automated reply was enough to lose a client for good.
00:10:39 - Outsourcing the thinking, not just the task: Catching herself two hours deep in a Claude chat for something that should've taken fifteen minutes.
00:14:09 - The patchwork trap: Why chunking everything into AI prompts can quietly replace the thinking it was supposed to support.
00:17:22 - An accidental expertise: How a university program she almost turned down turned into a career built on making dense, academic thinking make sense to anyone.
00:25:56 - Why listing your credentials doesn't build trust: The three things people actually judge you on, and why showing beats telling.
00:38:24 - The health scare that changed the timeline: A breast cancer scan turned "someday I'll go out on my own" into now.
Resources mentioned:
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Dr Luella Forbes
Dr Luella Forbes is a consultant specialising in Organisational Change and founder of The Career Library and it's podcast, Career Stories.
