"The fretting has swelled from a murmur to a clamor, all variations on the same foreboding theme: " Your Brain on ChatGPT." " AI Is Making You Dumber." " AI Is Killing Critical Thinking." Once, the fear was of a runaway intelligence that would wipe us out, maybe while turning the planet into a paper-clip factory. Now that chatbots are going the way of Google-moving from the miraculous to the taken-for-granted-the anxiety has shifted, too, from apocalypse to atrophy."
"Kids who turn to Gemini to summarize Twelfth Night may never learn to wrestle with Shakespeare on their own. Aspiring lawyers who use Harvey AI for legal analysis may fail to develop the interpretive muscle their predecessors took for granted. In a recent study, several hundred U.K. participants were given a standard critical-thinking test and were interviewed about their AI use for finding information or making decisions. Younger users leaned more on the technology, and scored lower on the test."
"But the real puzzle isn't whether de-skilling exists-it plainly does-but rather what kind of thing it is. Are all forms of de-skilling corrosive? Or are there kinds that we can live with, that might even be welcome? De-skilling is a catchall term for losses of very different kinds: some costly, some trivial, some oddly generative. To grasp what's at stake, we have to look closely at the ways that skill frays, fades, or mutates when new technologies arrive."
Concerns about AI have shifted from fears of runaway intelligence to worries about cognitive atrophy and de-skilling. Teachers report students relying on chatbots, risking loss of engagement with primary texts; lawyers using AI risk failing to develop interpretive skills. A U.K. study linked greater AI reliance among younger users to lower critical-thinking scores. A separate study found physicians who used AI-assisted polyp flagging became worse at unaided detection after three months. De-skilling encompasses diverse outcomes—costly, trivial, and sometimes generative—and requires close analysis of how skills fray, fade, or mutate with new technologies.
Read at The Atlantic
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